It appears that Stan Barber <sob@academ.com> said:
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I would suggest that the regulation paradigm in Texas does not allow coordinated maintenance scheduling to adapt to supply and load issues (especially in the face of a disaster like the Winter event earlier this year). That would mean a stronger regulatory framework and that smacks of government interference in the eyes of some.
Exactly. It's all about risk shifting. Ercot is run by free market fundamentalists who believe, in spite of considerable evidence to the contrary, that the market alone will always provide all the power people need. This has the effect of shifting the risk of failure onto users who often don't realize that until it's too late. They've known since 2011 that much of the Texas grid fails when it's below freezing but they don't have any inclination, or even the authority, to tell power generators to spend money on weatherproofing and other risk management. They allow the wholesale price of power which is usually about 4c/kwh to spike as high as $9, in the absurd belief that super high prices will magically cause power to appear. This had the effect of dumping giant power bills on users who couldn't pay them, and the costs and defaults are now making lawyers rich. Meanwhile, the politicans are involved in an extensive effort to pin the blame on anyone but themselves, which is where the nonsense about green power comes from. Texas' windmills aren't weatherproofed any better than rest of the system but nontheless were providing slightly more power than Ercot expected while the grid collapsed. So, yeah, if you're in Texas, better make your own arrangments because the state is paralyzed. -- Regards, John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly