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ERCOT, PUC, and deregulation got us here


cactusflinthead

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1 hour ago, MoJames said:

Yup, I tend to go t-shirt in these situations. In Colorado it is a bit warmer than normal as it is getting up to the 90s but dipping into the 50s at night. T-shirt really comes through in all situations imo.

You’ve convinced me. Im moving and going to bring as many as I can with me. 

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1 hour ago, Js1 said:

At what point does Cruz come out to blame the Green New Deal and Abbott tell Texans that the citizens of the state should have no reasonable expectations of AC/heat or electricity anymore during extreme cold or heat? 

Is the wall going to be solar, with windmills on top?  Is it even going to be ADA compliant?  If I go into a public restroom and the lights are out, how am I gonna know if there are chicks with dicks in there?

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2 hours ago, SydneyCarton said:

I'm not sure what good that is going to do, he won't feel a thing even if you've got fucking bowling balls down there. 

Why don't you just slap his face with them instead?

Would he feel a bat to his face?  
 

-kidding

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Just now, Biff Tannen said:

In no way am I defending fucking ERCOT, but the demand is probably way higher than it's ever been due to increase in population, no?

Who could have seen that coming?  Give them a break.

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49 minutes ago, cactusflinthead said:

 

This motherfucker is an idiot or lying, Probably both. There’s been a dozen or more conservation alerts every summer for the last 10-15 years. 2 years ago half the people in this thread, el fenix specifically, were chronicling them in a discussion about Griddy. 
 

pretty sure there’s records kept of these things.  Like his position is demonstrably provable as wrong. 

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3 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

In no way am I defending fucking ERCOT, but the demand is probably way higher than it's ever been due to increase in population, no?

No, actually. As the population has grown, some new generation has come online. Additionally, you’d be amazed at the strides made in energy efficiency in the last 10 years. All our devices big and small operate on less energy. Fuck, 10 years ago people were screaming we’d be out of power the next year. Then amazingly things were all ok. And if there was danger, some mothballed plants wouldn’t have been mothballed. 
 

The scarcity is at least partially by design. 

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2 hours ago, SydneyCarton said:

No clue. But if it's true a nuclear plan is down for whatever reason, yeah, I'm going to go ahead and give folks the benefit of the doubt for taking it offline.

I can comfortably say plants aren't down because natural gas lines froze. So there's that. But bringing more backup plants online for a mid 90's day wouldn't be normal, so it makes sense if plants are down  there isn't anything to replace it with. 

If true about the nuclear plant, why the fuck wouldn't they be required to tell us if that were the case? Why do we have to just guess at why X, Y, or Z plant is down?

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4 minutes ago, bolverk said:

If true about the nuclear plant, why the fuck wouldn't they be required to tell us if that were the case? Why do we have to just guess at why X, Y, or Z plant is down?

The news about the nuclear plant came out this weekend. That does have an impact but what is concerning is all the unexpected plants going offline other than Comanche Peak. People keep making jokes about who could predict this hot weather but the reality is the majority of these outages were unplanned and not approved scheduled maintenance.

A bunch of shit broke at the same time and that is a little unusual. 

 

 

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12 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

This motherfucker is an idiot or lying, Probably both. There’s been a dozen or more conservation alerts every summer for the last 10-15 years. 2 years ago half the people in this thread, el fenix specifically, were chronicling them in a discussion about Griddy. 
 

pretty sure there’s records kept of these things.  Like his position is demonstrably provable as wrong. 

He got called out on it. 

To be fair that one was in August and not the first case of swamp ass for the year.

Dollar says he gets a list of the times it has been issued in the last 7. That's still fucked up. The Lege, the PUC, and the Railroad Commission aren't going to do anything that requires actually spending money from producers anywhere along the line. All that money is coming out of our pockets, not theirs.

 

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2 minutes ago, F250 said:

The news about the nuclear plant came out this weekend. That does have an impact but what is concerning is all the unexpected plants going offline other than Comanche Peak. People keep making jokes about who could predict this hot weather but the reality is the majority of these outages were unplanned and not approved scheduled maintenance.

A bunch of shit broke at the same time and that is a little unusual. 

 

 

I mean they usually detail it. The nuclear thing was a rumor. But they spell it out fairly clearly:

http://www.ercot.com/news/releases/show/233037
 

what’s happening and why. They’re not planned outages. So, you can’t predict breakage. But if folks want to gripe that this is poor planning ahead of summer season by individual plant operators, well ok. It’s not like the lege has indicated companies will be punished for not keeping shit up to date and primed. ERCOT has limited control over that shit. 

 

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1 minute ago, cactusflinthead said:

He got called out on it. 

To be fair that one was in August and not the first case of swamp ass for the year.

Dollar says he gets a list of the times it has been issued in the last 7. That's still fucked up. The Lege, the PUC, and the Railroad Commission aren't going to do anything that requires actually spending money from producers anywhere along the line. All that money is coming out of our pockets, not theirs.

 

Lol. What a moron. “We were told it could be fixed.” Oh, we just up and “fixed” all machinery forever did we? What a fucking moron. I hope he’s drug across the coals and dies of humiliation. 
 

cant argue with the second part of your post though. Should shit be breaking in June? No. But that wasn’t what dipshit the intrepid reporter was saying. He said it never happened. Fuck that cunt. 

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I once sat in a DHS sponsored emergency grid planning event. There was a big meeting on coming up with emergency scenarios for a table top exercise. There was this one creepy plant worker that just gave off the Milton "red stapler" vibe. The dude goes on and on about how a disgruntled plant worker could take a plant offline without ever being caught and goes into detail on the how. Says he has been coming up with the scenario for years and wanted to share it.

Everyone's reaction in the room.

Excuse Me Reaction GIF by Mashable

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Just now, cactusflinthead said:

Why is it limited? Because that's how they want it.

Build in some extra production and the price goes down. Can't have that.

Theres backup plants. But they take time to warm up. Days usually. If shit breaks well you’re just gonna have to deal. You cant just turn shut on like a light. But you’re not wrong. Companies don’t want things to run smoothly. They want to make money at times like this. 

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From the TM article.

Boyle: The legislation does not provide any target for what winterization or weatherization means, leaving it up to the agencies like the Railroad Commission in Texas to define. There’s so much influence by the oil and gas industry on the commission, I worry about what kind of rules will come out of the RRC. That’s of concern. Nothing was done to figure out how we get the electricity reserves that are necessary to meet the requirements of an extreme weather event. 

We also would have hoped there would have been something said about new gas wells. At a minimum, new wells ought to be winterized and there are about ten thousand wells out there that played an important part [in the failure of the grid], as admitted by the industry itself. They ought to be winterized. There’s no reason to delay. I think the real sad thing is, can we rely on the Railroad Commission to do right in the rules and getting winterization in place? The answer is we can’t.

 

 

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2 minutes ago, cactusflinthead said:

From the TM article.

Boyle: The legislation does not provide any target for what winterization or weatherization means, leaving it up to the agencies like the Railroad Commission in Texas to define. There’s so much influence by the oil and gas industry on the commission, I worry about what kind of rules will come out of the RRC. That’s of concern. Nothing was done to figure out how we get the electricity reserves that are necessary to meet the requirements of an extreme weather event. 

We also would have hoped there would have been something said about new gas wells. At a minimum, new wells ought to be winterized and there are about ten thousand wells out there that played an important part [in the failure of the grid], as admitted by the industry itself. They ought to be winterized. There’s no reason to delay. I think the real sad thing is, can we rely on the Railroad Commission to do right in the rules and getting winterization in place? The answer is we can’t.

 

 

Yeah I didn’t need to read it. 

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14 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

Yeah I didn’t need to read it. 

Most here don't. It's good for the rest of us that don't deal with it every day.

Well, we do. It's coming out of our wallet. Some of us died last winter. But all the layers of influence that determine how much we pay and how it all works is more than a little bit opaque.

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The news about the nuclear plant came out this weekend. That does have an impact but what is concerning is all the unexpected plants going offline other than Comanche Peak. People keep making jokes about who could predict this hot weather but the reality is the majority of these outages were unplanned and not approved scheduled maintenance.
A bunch of shit broke at the same time and that is a little unusual. 
 
 

I have a feeling we are about to get fucked like Enron did with California
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20 minutes ago, cactusflinthead said:

Most here don't. It's good for the rest of us that don't deal with it every day.

Well, we do. It's coming out of our wallet. Some of us died last winter. But all the layers of influence that determine how much we pay and how it all works is more than a little bit opaque.

Oh I know man. 

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That’s very unlikely. 

Why did so many producers just go down unexpectedly? Shouldnt they be available or fined if not able to produce when they say they can? Ercot says 3x the amount are down and they don’t know why. It’s not crazy weather right now

I am curious. I don’t know the market but it is seeming a lot like what happened to California. Shut shit down for a bit for “maintenance “ and drive up prices.

It’s obvious we don’t have enough reserves so it would be easy
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1 minute ago, Updawg said:


Why did so many producers just go down unexpectedly? Shouldnt they be available or fined if not able to produce when they say they can? Ercot says 3x the amount are down and they don’t know why. It’s not crazy weather right now

I am curious. I don’t know the market but it is seeming a lot like what happened to California. Shut shit down for a bit for “maintenance “ and drive up prices.

It’s obvious we don’t have enough reserves so it would be easy

They went down because shit broke. 
 

maybe they should be fined. That’s at least a path to change. 
 

california was literally criminal conspiracy by Enron folks who shut down perfectly fine plants to generate scarcity and jack up prices. It was revealed upon investigation. That is unlikely to happen again, as I said. These operators/companies are all independent so you’re talking about a criminal conspiracy among many different entities, and I havent seen just one company yet that is as corrupt and evil as Enron was from top to bottom. Nevermind that they’d be ruined if discovered. And in this environment folks are dying to expose a bad player. I don’t see it. 

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They went down because shit broke. 
 
maybe they should be fined. That’s at least a path to change. 
 
california was literally criminal conspiracy by Enron folks who shut down perfectly fine plants to generate scarcity and jack up prices. It was revealed upon investigation. That is unlikely to happen again, as I said. These operators/companies are all independent so you’re talking about a criminal conspiracy among many different entities, and I havent seen just one company yet that is as corrupt and evil as Enron was from top to bottom. Nevermind that they’d be ruined if discovered. And in this environment folks are dying to expose a bad player. I don’t see it. 

I hope you are right.

I just watched that Enron movie recently so that’s why I am thinking this. Still doesn’t seem too far fetched to me.

I absolutely think there needs to be accountability if you say you can produce But dont. Would fix a lot
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1 minute ago, Updawg said:


I hope you are right.

I just watched that Enron movie recently so that’s why I am thinking this. Still doesn’t seem too far fetched to me.

I absolutely think there needs to be accountability if you say you can produce But dont. Would fix a lot

Eh, I’m right. 
 

The idea isn’t far-fetched because it’s oddly so close to how the market is designed to work. Scarcity creates demand. But it’s one thing for the lege to not creates changes. It’s another for multiple companies (because no one owns all the generation) to engage in a tacit agreement to create shortages. Now, show me that all the plants down today were owned by the same company. I haven’t even looked at the spot market pricing for today. Ok, then maybe. 

We need a boatload of changes. 

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Agreed.

If our market gets taken advantage of though, we will probably never know. But I hope it can’t.

The independent evaluator of the winter fiasco said we overpaid by like $4billion but of course we didn’t try and recoup that

Why even bother having independent market watchers when the head of the PUC guarantee profits

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18 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

 

Does this obstreperous man understand that digital currencies need electricity to transact and be stored?  You can't build a physical, literal wall to keep them in Texas.  

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1 minute ago, Lobo said:

Does this obstreperous man understand that digital currencies need electricity to transact and be stored?  You can't build a physical, literal wall to keep them in Texas.  

This is what he understands.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/bitcoin-cryptocurrency-texas-blockchain-leader/

Quote

The push to transform Texas’s abundance of rural areas with surprisingly robust and cheap electricity access into Bitcoin mining towns has exponentially increased, driven by the currency’s surge to record levels (as of April 29, one Bitcoin is worth close to $53,000. The high was earlier in April: $63,729.50).

Bitcoin, it turns out, isn’t done with Rockdale; several companies are investing hundreds of millions there, taking advantage of electrical infrastructure left behind by Alcoa, a Pittsburgh-based aluminum company that at one time employed two thousand residents of the town. Earlier this month, the Bitcoin mining company Riot Blockchain signed a deal to buy Whinstone US’s Rockdale mining operation for $651 million in cash and stock. Texas now has the largest Bitcoin mining presence of any state.

Quote

Yet Texas’s relatively cheap electricity has led to the mining boom, which in turn has garnered additional support from politicians, including Governor Greg Abbott, to make Texas a Bitcoin leader.

Quote

Korok Ray, director of A&M’s Mays Innovation Research Center at the Mays Business School, said the conference proved successful because interest in the sector has spiked. “Bitcoin mining in Texas is particularly promising, given our global advantage in energy supply,” he said.

They aren't using too much power

Quote

With Whinstone as its site provider, Rhodium has access to about eight hundred megawatts of power.

 

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41 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

They went down because shit broke. 
 

maybe they should be fined. That’s at least a path to change. 
 

california was literally criminal conspiracy by Enron folks who shut down perfectly fine plants to generate scarcity and jack up prices. It was revealed upon investigation. That is unlikely to happen again, as I said. These operators/companies are all independent so you’re talking about a criminal conspiracy among many different entities, and I havent seen just one company yet that is as corrupt and evil as Enron was from top to bottom. Nevermind that they’d be ruined if discovered. And in this environment folks are dying to expose a bad player. I don’t see it. 

Just thinking out loud, what about on the natural gas side? They're the ones who made out like highway robbers during the freeze, despite it being their own doing to be so ill prepared

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12 minutes ago, Captainant said:

Just thinking out loud, what about on the natural gas side? They're the ones who made out like highway robbers during the freeze, despite it being their own doing to be so ill prepared

Not quite accurate. Define “natural gas.” It isn’t the guys mining it. Natural gas prices are still super low. It’s the guys who own generstion plants (who turn natural gas into electricity) who made out while their shit broke. 

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1 hour ago, SydneyCarton said:

The idea isn’t far-fetched because it’s oddly so close to how the market is designed to work. Scarcity creates demand. But it’s one thing for the lege to not creates changes. It’s another for multiple companies (because no one owns all the generation) to engage in a tacit agreement to create shortages. Now, show me that all the plants down today were owned by the same company. I haven’t even looked at the spot market pricing for today. Ok, then maybe.

But scarcity doesn't create demand - it only increases prices. In fact, scarcity arguably drew down demand as we endeavored to save the gotdam grid.

That's not the real issue for me though. I want transparency. I want to know specifically which plants went down and why. I want to know what the fuck they were doing in preparation for increased demand due to higher temps, why it wasn't dealt with sooner, and why they let their shit all break at once. I want to know exactly who is responsible and why we can't have reliable energy in this state. Is that too much to ask for in a supposedly first world country & state with an abundance of energy from multiple sources in the year 2021?

I also want you to know I'm not bagging on you, and I don't see you as an apologist because you've stated clearly that changes need to be made. It's just that it's an infuriating situation that seems pretty fucking fixable while our governor and legislature concern themselves with all these other bullshit I'm-scared-of-social-change issues to distract and placate the Southern Baptist adherents among whom I was raised while telling them the "invisible hand of the market" is their gawd and savior. 

Edited by bolverk
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But scarcity doesn't create demand - it only increases prices. In fact, scarcity arguably drew down demand as we endeavored to save the gotdam grid.
That's not the real issue for me though. I want transparency. I want to know specifically which plants went down and why. I want to know what the fuck they were doing in preparation for increased demand due to higher temps, why it wasn't dealt with sooner, and why they let their shit all break at once. I want to know exactly who is responsible and why we can't have reliable energy in this state. Is that too much to ask for in a supposedly first world country & state with an abundance of energy from multiple sources in the year 2021?
I also want you to know I'm not bagging on you, and I don't see you as an apologist because you've stated clearly that changes need to be made. It's just that it's an infuriating situation that seems pretty fucking fixable while our governor and legislature concern themselves with all these other bullshit I'm-scared-of-social-change issues to distract and placate the Southern Baptist adherents among whom I was raised while telling them the "invisible hand of the market" is their gawd and savior. 

Enron built a barge in Nigeria we could use.

But yeah, there is no transparency or repercussions it seems to me.
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5 minutes ago, bolverk said:

But scarcity doesn't create demand - it only increases prices. In fact, scarcity arguably drew down demand as we endeavored to save the gotdam grid.

That's not the real issue for me though. I want transparency. I want to know specifically which plants went down and why. I want to know what the fuck they were doing in preparation for increased demand due to higher temps, why it wasn't dealt with sooner, and why they let their shit all break at once. I want to know exactly who is responsible and why we can't have reliable energy in this state. Is that too much to ask for in a supposedly first world country & state with an abundance of energy from multiple sources in the year 2021?

I also want you to know I'm not bagging on you, and I don't see you as an apologist because you've stated clearly that changes need to be made. It's just that it's an infuriating situation that seems pretty fucking fixable while our governor and legislature concern themselves with all these other bullshit I'm-scared-of-social-change issues to distract and placate the Southern Baptist adherents among whom I was raised while telling them the "invisible hand of the market" is their gawd and savior. 


eh, scarcity does increase demand. More folks fighting for less resources is the definition. Whether we have control of the fight is irrelevant. Also, we’re both being pedantic at this point. 

Yeah, you’re mad as hell, and you’re not gonna take it anymore. 

In all seriousness, this post crosses over into ERCOT specific shit and general cloak room fuck this corrupt shitbag party shit. Which is fine I don’t disagree, but it fits perfectly in about 15 other threads here. Which is a sad testament to where we are...

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2 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

In all seriousness, this post crosses over into ERCOT specific shit and general cloak room fuck this corrupt shitbag party shit. Which is fine I don’t disagree, but it fits perfectly in about 15 other threads here. Which is a sad testament to where we are...

Well, this is the Cloak Room and if I can't rant about bullshit party politics here, where can I?

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Just now, SydneyCarton said:

I wasn’t suggesting you stop or quit. Simply that it’s no longer an ERCOT/PUC specific discussion. 

I get that. ERCOT, form my understanding, basically just manages the load as best as they can, and the PUC just carries out the regulations that they are given. The real problem lies with our bought-and-paid-for legislature, our bought-and-paid-for governor, and our gullible rubes.

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1 hour ago, bolverk said:

That's not the real issue for me though. I want transparency. I want to know specifically which plants went down and why. I want to know what the fuck they were doing in preparation for increased demand due to higher temps, why it wasn't dealt with sooner, and why they let their shit all break at once. I want to know exactly who is responsible and why we can't have reliable energy in this state. Is that too much to ask for in a supposedly first world country & state with an abundance of energy from multiple sources in the year 2021?

This is critical infrastructure and a lot of this information should not be shared publicly. So, Bolverk will never really know what, when or why. However, yes there should be auditors armed with big regulatory sticks that can find out this information and issue out significant financial punishment that will force owners to keep their infrastructure reliable.

 

 

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