This misses an explanation why the suit was brought against the wholesale providers, and not the retail electric companies. I would expect that in general if there a dispute over services rendered, you need to work things out with your supplier, and not someone else further down the chain.
The split between retail and wholesale puts the retail arms at the mercy of wholesale. This went all the way up the line to gas providers, who just decided to declare force majeure and closed up shop. Vistra tried desperately to keep the power on, and wound up losing over $1 billion for their troubles.
Texas has a great system under normal conditions that has incentivized a ton of solar and Panhandle wind, but it is not built for severe conditions.
> Texas has a great system under normal conditions that has incentivized a ton of solar and Panhandle wind, but it is not built for severe conditions.
I don’t know that it’s “great” for anyone except the guys in the energy market who see the upside from volatility. The rates I see right now are higher than what my local utility charges, about on par with our all-renewable option, and we have no downside scenario where the prices skyrocket or the power goes out with no accountability. I do appreciate the amount of wind power (and hope the politicians don’t stymie that industry) but it doesn’t appear to be especially unique in that growth.
It has a great system for the various entities that own the state legislature.
Public utilities are essential services. “Great when times are good” literally is the worst type of arrangement. Having a public entity that exits to drive private profit is disgusting and a great example of the insanity of modern political thought.
I would guess that companies are often exempt in cases such as natural disasters or extreme weather events and there are entities responsible to prevent things like this from happening. Electric Reliability Council of Texas sounds like such an entity.
I don’t think that makes sense. The retail companies are at the mercy of the grid.
The miss here is what about PUCT who governs ERCOT. ERCOT did everything in their set of rules. We probably need to change the rules for emergencies, that’s up to the legislature and the appointees of PUCT.
Legal immunity is pretty sweet. I'm surprised Amazon hasn't demanded this of states along with the other tax breaks and free stuff they expect to get when opening a new headquarters or major dist center.
Is there like just a form you fill out to get this?
As a Texas resident I think this is a good thing. The real untouched key point is legislature creates the rules and they never designed it with emergency in mind. I doubt it was nefarious at the time in the late 90s.
So you’re saying sovereign immunity is good because that’s how the legislation was created. Since it wasn’t designed to deal with emergency, it’s okay to not update the position on sovereign immunity?
This is one of the things I find quite surreal about the US. How is it not government's responsibility to ensure citizens have access to basic utilities?
I think there is a difference between "access to basic utilities" and the power is down because a power station caught on fire for example.
Access to basic utilities is provided, but uptime is not 100% and never will be. And nobody can expect them to be, if you have a life threatening issue which requires 24/7 power, you should have a backup like a generator that automatically kicks on for your life providing machine, and maybe even a third backup. Same as if you host something that needs 3 9s of uptime, you have a primary host and a backup host or region or what ever.
> Access to basic utilities is provided, but uptime is not 100% and never will be.
The issue in Texas isn't that power was out for a few hours, the issue is it was out for several days. This should be unacceptable and it is absolutely reasonable to expect a rich, developed nation to guarantee this does not happen. Especially in freak weather events that are going to increase in frequency in the future due to climate change.
Even within a neoliberal country it's entirely within the realms of the government to force corporations that maintain infrastructure to comply with basic service guarantees or at least threaten to nationalize the business, you can privatize it later again. This is critical infrastructure. I know people dying doesn't matter to libs, but this cost other corporations in Texas a lot of money too. How can you have a free market where the basic infrastructure is this unreliable.
> if you have a life threatening issue which requires 24/7 power, you should have a backup like a generator that automatically kicks on for your life providing machine, and maybe even a third backup.
Kinda? Fire service is not provided everywhere. Some cities you have to hire your own / purchase a plan. Granted a lot of cities just factor it into taxes but it's not a mandate to provide.
Kind of: none of this was agreed to by a majority of the people – the entire United States law was originally drafted by white male landowners, and Texas has relied heavily on creative policies around voting since the civil rights era banned outright prevention - and over time these principles reinterpretation over time by judges who usually are not popularly elected. That puts us in an interesting situation where nobody voted directly for a position most voters wouldn’t agree to but there isn’t a single villain to vote out or a simple ballot initiative to put in the next election. If you asked whether there should be no obligation to provide power, for anyone to show up when you call 9/11, etc. most people would say that’s wrong but have a daunting path to change it.
This is how everything here works. People who get involved enough to learn how something works stay winning and people who think they do get burned.
Same as insurance, credit cards, real estate, investing, the justice system, health, education, pretty much everything. Also, every one of these potential pitfalls has a zillion dollar budget hyper focused on tricking you through advertising.
It may be juvenile but as a Dutch person “kut.org” and “kut news” is so surreal to read.
Maybe on point: as someone living in a country with relative big government and reaping the huge quality of life reward from it, I just can’t understand why people would want to create a society where you risk losing basic facilities such as electricity.
What happened in Texas is such a string of failures to actually govern and force companies to adhere to regulations, it’s crazy to me.
Pretty much all of Dutch society (trains, highways etc.) shuts down every couple of years due to something that would be considered light snowfall further north in Europe.
The temperature in Texas reliably doesn't go below freezing, except in freak weather events such as these. That's why they had water pipes exploding everywhere.
So I think this is analogous to the Netherlands having a week of >40°C weather (>105°F).
Sure, you could blame the government for some of the resulting chaos, but it's also partly the freak event itself.
Most of the people that died in that event in Texas would be alive if they had sufficiently warm clothing. Is that entirely the fault of the government?
You’re heavily overstating the effects of weather on Dutch society and heavily understating the frequency and nature of weather events in Texas.
In The Netherlands the worst you’ll typically see is some delays with trains, perhaps a couple of trains (of the many per hour) being cancelled.
In my 30+ years in the Netherlands I’ve never experienced a brownout, much less a blackout. Hell I haven’t even experienced a modest outage. Only once have I heard of a blackout, and that was when a helicopter flew into power lines.
And that’s not even touching on how ridiculous it is that you’re trying to equate being able to stay warm and alive at home with being able to travel, while at the same time trying to blame people for not being prepared for something you claim is rare.
I think some of the blame towards Texas is due to many of their politicians denying that climate change exists. Texas is a major oil producer, and is on the higher end of CO2 emissions per capita. They should probably realize that their once reliable weather patterns are not going to be reliable anymore.
What are you talking about? Freezing weather is definitely not a freak event in Texas. Probably approaching 10% of days in many parts of Texas.
“If they had sufficiently warm clothes”… sufficient is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Besides, if freezing is such a freak event, why do you expect people to prepare and not the government to prepare.
The temperatures in many homes were below freezing for several days. There are normal citizens who cannot survive such an event.
It's a radio call sign: K because it's West of the Mississippi River, UT for the University of Texas, and three letters because the license dates to 1925 before the FCC completely moved to four letters.
The positive part of this is that at least in some degree this will lead to more people going off-grid and the companies losing customers, a win both for general survivability and the need to legitimize unreliable centralized poo you have dependence on.
It’s quite often illegal to go off-grid and the power companies will also create financial disincentives (formalized via regulatory powers) for backfeeding the grid when they don’t want it to happen.
They have made sure it’s a heads they win, tails you lose situation.
I agree that sometimes counties have too many permits and requirements for rural areas but largely in any populated town, it makes sense to prevent off grid buildings. Similar to if you had a home without sewer hookups or permitted septic.
On the back feeding side, I am not sure. While in many areas it’s not as financially lucrative to add back to the grid, it also is a much more realistic number. For too long areas like CA had models that meant homes were not contributing to the transmission they could access and were being paid closer to retail rates instead of generation rates.
So I don’t think it’s quite as one sided as you paint it.
I suspect that is by-in-large the point of the US de-regulatory project. If one deconstructs the state to the point of ineffectiveness then its existence is largely pointless and reasonably easy to discard for a newer state. Of course this presents an opportunity to form a new state in a more desirable configuration for involved parties.
The impression I get from friends living in TX who have been sympathetic to TX for their entire lives, is that it's been a slow process working towards effectively only having behavioral laws for poor people.
And yes, a common trope of their complaints is a kafkaesque system where it seemingly exists exclusively to be underfunded, under performing and practically intended to breed more resentment from the general population so that they're more amenable to just completely dismantling the civilian system altogether since they now see no incentive or convincing argument for it.
It's genuinely scary. Especially since you get to pretend like you're trying and the system just doesn't work, so we need to get rid of it to "save money".
Readit News
Texas has a great system under normal conditions that has incentivized a ton of solar and Panhandle wind, but it is not built for severe conditions.
I don’t know that it’s “great” for anyone except the guys in the energy market who see the upside from volatility. The rates I see right now are higher than what my local utility charges, about on par with our all-renewable option, and we have no downside scenario where the prices skyrocket or the power goes out with no accountability. I do appreciate the amount of wind power (and hope the politicians don’t stymie that industry) but it doesn’t appear to be especially unique in that growth.
No. It's not winter proof, it's not interconnected with it's neighbors.
It absolutely is not a "great system". It's a controlled system for its own greed.
Public utilities are essential services. “Great when times are good” literally is the worst type of arrangement. Having a public entity that exits to drive private profit is disgusting and a great example of the insanity of modern political thought.
The miss here is what about PUCT who governs ERCOT. ERCOT did everything in their set of rules. We probably need to change the rules for emergencies, that’s up to the legislature and the appointees of PUCT.
I suspect the answer is far more mundane: the consumers purchased something like 98% availability, and this is what they got.
Is there like just a form you fill out to get this?
And NERC is basically the same structure as ERCOT.
Access to basic utilities is provided, but uptime is not 100% and never will be. And nobody can expect them to be, if you have a life threatening issue which requires 24/7 power, you should have a backup like a generator that automatically kicks on for your life providing machine, and maybe even a third backup. Same as if you host something that needs 3 9s of uptime, you have a primary host and a backup host or region or what ever.
The issue in Texas isn't that power was out for a few hours, the issue is it was out for several days. This should be unacceptable and it is absolutely reasonable to expect a rich, developed nation to guarantee this does not happen. Especially in freak weather events that are going to increase in frequency in the future due to climate change.
Even within a neoliberal country it's entirely within the realms of the government to force corporations that maintain infrastructure to comply with basic service guarantees or at least threaten to nationalize the business, you can privatize it later again. This is critical infrastructure. I know people dying doesn't matter to libs, but this cost other corporations in Texas a lot of money too. How can you have a free market where the basic infrastructure is this unreliable.
Most Americans could never afford that.
Same as insurance, credit cards, real estate, investing, the justice system, health, education, pretty much everything. Also, every one of these potential pitfalls has a zillion dollar budget hyper focused on tricking you through advertising.
We somehow still have an obligation to pay their salaries, though.
Maybe on point: as someone living in a country with relative big government and reaping the huge quality of life reward from it, I just can’t understand why people would want to create a society where you risk losing basic facilities such as electricity.
What happened in Texas is such a string of failures to actually govern and force companies to adhere to regulations, it’s crazy to me.
The temperature in Texas reliably doesn't go below freezing, except in freak weather events such as these. That's why they had water pipes exploding everywhere.
So I think this is analogous to the Netherlands having a week of >40°C weather (>105°F).
Sure, you could blame the government for some of the resulting chaos, but it's also partly the freak event itself.
Most of the people that died in that event in Texas would be alive if they had sufficiently warm clothing. Is that entirely the fault of the government?
In The Netherlands the worst you’ll typically see is some delays with trains, perhaps a couple of trains (of the many per hour) being cancelled.
In my 30+ years in the Netherlands I’ve never experienced a brownout, much less a blackout. Hell I haven’t even experienced a modest outage. Only once have I heard of a blackout, and that was when a helicopter flew into power lines.
And that’s not even touching on how ridiculous it is that you’re trying to equate being able to stay warm and alive at home with being able to travel, while at the same time trying to blame people for not being prepared for something you claim is rare.
“If they had sufficiently warm clothes”… sufficient is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Besides, if freezing is such a freak event, why do you expect people to prepare and not the government to prepare.
The temperatures in many homes were below freezing for several days. There are normal citizens who cannot survive such an event.
They have made sure it’s a heads they win, tails you lose situation.
On the back feeding side, I am not sure. While in many areas it’s not as financially lucrative to add back to the grid, it also is a much more realistic number. For too long areas like CA had models that meant homes were not contributing to the transmission they could access and were being paid closer to retail rates instead of generation rates.
So I don’t think it’s quite as one sided as you paint it.
And yes, a common trope of their complaints is a kafkaesque system where it seemingly exists exclusively to be underfunded, under performing and practically intended to breed more resentment from the general population so that they're more amenable to just completely dismantling the civilian system altogether since they now see no incentive or convincing argument for it.
It's genuinely scary. Especially since you get to pretend like you're trying and the system just doesn't work, so we need to get rid of it to "save money".
Or more likely you will end up governed by monopoly corporations.