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The grid failure in Texas was a market failure

Coal is not bad for the planet, It is merely that the technology has reach maturity and so there’s no money to be made off grifting with it.

except it is, it is bad when you take it out of the ground and bad when you burn it. That it is not nearly as bad as it used to be does not make it good for the planet. Windturbines aka renewable energy is good for the planet IMO.
 
The State of Texas was warned ten years ago about the threat.

Insulation of water pipes was recommended,

Other recommendations were also recommended.

Republicans ignored the recommendations.

They fly to other states or countries while others suffer.
 
I believe that regulation and having government ownership of utilities will increase prices a little, but when Texans are dying (children, fathers ...) to keep us deregulated we may have taken our independence too far. I also wonder if the financial cost of being unprepared outways the money saved by focusing on the 99.9% of the time that we don't need to be winterized ... it is like big money was saying - hey - we can make money by saving on winterization costs and if something unusual happens we can have taxpayers bail us out.... this alone points to the need for regulation now let's ponder about the cost in human lives ... privatization and independence isn't always the best solution!
 
I believe that regulation and having government ownership of utilities will increase prices a little, but when Texans are dying (children, fathers ...) to keep us deregulated we may have taken our independence too far. I also wonder if the financial cost of being unprepared outways the money saved by focusing on the 99.9% of the time that we don't need to be winterized ... it is like big money was saying - hey - we can make money by saving on winterization costs and if something unusual happens we can have taxpayers bail us out.... this alone points to the need for regulation now let's ponder about the cost in human lives ... privatization and independence isn't always the best solution!
this is such a silly and unquantifiable argument. First off you have no idea how many people have actually died from lack of power, you have no idea if those people would’ve died anyway, you are making a presupposition I don’t agree with which is that you have a moral right to not lose power and if you are not prepared for an emergency you bear no responsibility for your own survival, there’s also the fact that there is no moral obligation to spend infinite amounts of money to make the system safe in unlikely events. You make the very same decisions yourself. You could buy a dump truck and be safe from car accidents, yet most people buy smaller cars that use less fuel to save the money.
 
The problem is the *lack* of regulation.

You seem to be a reasonable person, so I’ll just make a few points some of which address other posts. TX is not in any way a “de-regulated electricity market”. ERCOT is not as the OP says a “power broker”, it’s essentially an arm of the state PUC. It, and the PUC proper make all the rules for the market.

As you point out, one of the ways TX is different than other states is it has unbundled the utilities. Think of your electricity service as having 3 components. Your retail plan, the wire service that brings the power from the generators to you, and the generators. In TX the wires are operated by what are still essentially fully regulated utilities. In the other two areas, retail and generation TX allows competition. In an old school integrated utility market all that is done by the same company. They basically take all the money they spend to provide service and add it into the rate base and charge enough per kWh to earn a guaranteed profit. This is the main argument for breaking up the utility as TX did. The integrated utility has a huge incentive to spend money. They would famously argue for every dollar to be spent to take the grid to 99.999999% reliability. Because spending money is how they made money, guaranteed. From an economists standpoint there’s a diminishing marginal value and a high cost from going from say 99.99% to 99.9999999% reliability. Integrated utility doesn’t care. Politicians mostly don’t understand but also afraid of being blamed if power fails. Societal waste results.

So, anyway with that background, retail competition is not particularly exciting in my mind as relatively little of the capital to bring you power is spent here. It’s mostly about acquiring customers, buying the power to supply the customers you’ve acquired, and sending them bills. Again, every aspect of the retail market is regulated you can’t start selling retail electricity from a street corner. You have to be registered with the PUC, have your plans approved by the PUC (I believe, it’s been some time since I was involved in the retail side.) etc. I believe in most markets you can still get power from the incumbent utility on a fixed cents per kWh basis. Some people sign up for “free nights and weekends” or whatever. In my view unless you have some unusual power load profile (like you run a grow house at night :)) you’re not going to benefit much. Some would argue this sort of competition helps foster efficiency because those who do operate grow houses can decide to operate them only at night if they can save half of their power costs. Anyway, to offer these sorts of plans you need to get what is called “real time metering”. An old school meter says “you used 1000 kWh since the last time I read this”. A real time meter tracks your usage by hour. This allows people who use electricity in the lower demand hours to pay less for power over time. This is in theory a big way to gain efficiency since a lot of capacity is required to be up on the peak hours that sits idle the rest of the time. If you shave the peaks and fill in the valleys society benefits. I think in reality most people don’t want to deal with any of this. So I imagine the benefits of retail competition have been modest. And the cost is there are people out there signing up for real time plans and agreeing to tie their own electricity cost to the cost of wholesale power who will get big bills when wholesale power spikes. If you signed up for this sort of plan and then didn’t monitor the wholesale power price and change your usage accordingly that’s on you. Or maybe it’s a sign people are helpless and such plans need to be banned, if you’re into the whole paternalism thing. But you ban these plans you also lose a lot of the potential societal benefit from retail competition.
 
So, on to generation. Again, it’s not accurate to say generation in TX isn’t regulated. Yes the generation plants are owned by private companies, but this was also true in the old integrated utility world. What TX did (and they are not the only one as much of the US also did this) is allow private companies to compete with the incumbent utilities in a market with rules developed by the state regulators and overseen by the “grid operator” (aka ERCOT) which is overseen by the state regulator. ERCOT’s mission is to make the grid efficient and reliable. They forecast need, plant availability, purchase reliability services, manage the dispatch of the various generation plants etc as approved by the state regulator and or legislature. So, among other things they try to maintain a "reserve margin” of available generation beyond the forecast load in case the wind stops blowing or a plant goes down. The problem is this weather caused way more plants to go offline than they had estimated. I have also read it caused far higher load than they had estimated. These sorts of things can happen in the integrated utility world too. Regulation is not a magic word that makes power plants function, and the TX market *is* regulated. Anyway, I think what’s more unusual about TX is that it's a market very dependent on natural gas fired capacity for reliability. When the gas wells are freezing up, and the gas pipes are freezing, and the control systems on the gas generation plants are freezing, and huge amounts of gas are heading to keep the widows and orphans in homes heated across most of the country it was strain the system couldn’t handle. For those who want to rant about wind, the increasing amount of wind in TX has actually increased the reliance on gas while decreasing the incentive to invest in it. The grid rules in TX (again created by the government) force the grid operator to take wind and solar. The term is they are “must run”. This is why we get negative power prices when the wind is blowing, etc. Anyway, the market design has caused some baseload coal and nuclear plants to close, and gas plants in the stack to run less. The economics of running a large power plant when prices are negative is not great. This makes the CO2 emissions graph look good, but it makes the system less reliable. This didn’t happen over night and people were obviously aware of it. Steps can be and were taken to address this, but today we know those steps didn’t cover the actual event that happened.

So, I guess the regulators failed.;)
 
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If I lived in Texas, I would build a bermed home there. A bermed home will never get below 57 deg F (assuming it's closed up, and insulated well). Cool, but manageable, and no frozen water pipes. A bermed home will also stay cooler in the summer, and require less A/C to cool.

Good luck keeping water out of a bermed home in East Texas.
 
Good luck keeping water out of a bermed home in East Texas.
I have a bermed home. And you are correct. Water is a challenge, and it's a challenge anywhere. A well designed foundation drain at the base of the berming should alleviate any problems. Do they have basements in East Texas?
 
I have a bermed home. And you are correct. Water is a challenge, and it's a challenge anywhere. A well designed foundation drain at the base of the berming should alleviate any problems. Do they have basements in East Texas?

I’ve lived in Houston and Dallas which most wouldn’t call “East Tx” but are close to it, depending on where you draw the line and basements are extremely rare in both. I’d say basements generally are not common in TX, but don’t know for sure about the far west. East TX is pretty wet. Rivers and timber country. Like you picture Louisiana maybe. As go west to Central TX you get plains and hill country. Like you picture Oklahoma maybe. Then all the way west you get cowboys, cacti and tumbleweeds. Like many people picture Texas.
 
I have a bermed home. And you are correct. Water is a challenge, and it's a challenge anywhere. A well designed foundation drain at the base of the berming should alleviate any problems. Do they have basements in East Texas?
No, the water table is often too high for them.
 
Texas has had ten years to prepare for just this kind of event.

From 2011:




Winterization


Generators and natural gas producers suffered severe losses of capacity despite having received accurate forecasts of the storm. Entities in both categories report having winterization procedures in place. However, the poor performance of many of these generating units and wells suggests that these procedures were either inadequate or were not adequately followed.


-from the attached link
 
Was an entirely different fiasco than the 2021 Texas blackout.

It’s always a different fiasco. Electrical grids are complex. Nature is variable.

One of the great wonders of the internet is how quickly people with little or no relevant experience in a complex field can develop simple solutions to problems people with decades of experience managing consider complex. And how amazingly likely it is that the new-expert's simple solution matches the new-experts pre-existing political hobby-horses.

I sometimes wonder how we got by before we had people on the internet who could quickly become experts by reading some article posted by someone who shares their bias and solve all our problems.
 
It’s always a different fiasco. Electrical grids are complex. Nature is variable.

It was an entirely different fiasco.

The Northeast blackout of 2003 started in Ohio. Some high-voltage power lines failed, and the energy company that was supposed to manage this problem did not receive the alarms until it was too late. Had northern Ohio isolated itself as it was supposed to, the faults would have been contained to there, but the intertie going up to Ontario and then to New York was not cut. That's where all the power got sucked from, triggering a cascading failure.

One of the great wonders of the internet is how quickly people with little or no relevant experience in a complex field can develop simple solutions to problems people with decades of experience managing consider complex. And how amazingly likely it is that the new-expert's simple solution matches the new-experts pre-existing political hobby-horses.

I sometimes wonder how we got by before we had people on the internet who could quickly become experts by reading some article posted by someone who shares their bias and solve all our problems.

That's always been a problem, but the internet, particularly social media, has made it much worse.
 
It was an entirely different fiasco.

The Northeast blackout of 2003 started in Ohio. Some high-voltage power lines failed, and the energy company that was supposed to manage this problem did not receive the alarms until it was too late. Had northern Ohio isolated itself as it was supposed to, the faults would have been contained to there, but the intertie going up to Ontario and then to New York was not cut. That's where all the power got sucked from, triggering a cascading failure.

And to think there have been people attributing this TX issue to lack of interconnections.

Interconnections help fix some problems, interconnections cause other problems.

When you’ve got a system that requires real time balancing of thousands of load points with hundreds of generators across potentially congested transmission lines under dynamic conditions sometimes stuff is going to fail. That’s before we even start talking about the fact it’s dependent on a gas production and delivery system that is itself stressed by many of the same sorts of conditions that stress the power system.

I’ve been in the energy infrastructure industry for my entire career, but there are still aspects of each failure I find surprising. Others are fairly predictable. In this one I did not find it surprising that wells freeze up, or instrumentation freezes up because I've seen all that before. What I did find surprising was the inability to roll blackouts as well as I would have expected. I was personally without power for +/- 4 hours then had it for +/- 4 hours for a couple days. This is what I’d consider “rolling blackouts” and is more “inconvenience" than “disaster”. I’ve spoken to people who were without power for as much as 3 days, so I think there is some investigation required as to why that happened. May be localized issues in many cases, but I think there were probably some cases where they rolled the blackout on and then found they couldn’t roll it off. Would be interesting to understand why since I think this may be the big learning here. Effective mitigation is I suspect more cost effective than outright prevention of low probability events.

But then it wouldn’t be entirely surprising if there were a politicized irrational response from politicians. Been known to happen. Politicians are generally better at throwing buckets of money or regulations at the thing that caused the last problem than ensuring a system is efficient with respect to dealing with the many possible things that could cause the next one.
 
Was an entirely different fiasco than the 2021 Texas blackout.


I am not disagreeing with that. Just saying cascading power failures lead to this type of issue be it Summer or Winter.
 
So, on to generation. Again, it’s not accurate to say generation in TX isn’t regulated. Yes the generation plants are owned by private companies, but this was also true in the old integrated utility world. What TX did (and they are not the only one as much of the US also did this) is allow private companies to compete with the incumbent utilities in a market with rules developed by the state regulators and overseen by the “grid operator” (aka ERCOT) which is overseen by the state regulator. ERCOT’s mission is to make the grid efficient and reliable. They forecast need, plant availability, purchase reliability services, manage the dispatch of the various generation plants etc as approved by the state regulator and or legislature. So, among other things they try to maintain a "reserve margin” of available generation beyond the forecast load in case the wind stops blowing or a plant goes down. The problem is this weather caused way more plants to go offline than they had estimated. I have also read it caused far higher load than they had estimated. These sorts of things can happen in the integrated utility world too. Regulation is not a magic word that makes power plants function, and the TX market *is* regulated. Anyway, I think what’s more unusual about TX is that it's a market very dependent on natural gas fired capacity for reliability. When the gas wells are freezing up, and the gas pipes are freezing, and the control systems on the gas generation plants are freezing, and huge amounts of gas are heading to keep the widows and orphans in homes heated across most of the country it was strain the system couldn’t handle. For those who want to rant about wind, the increasing amount of wind in TX has actually increased the reliance on gas while decreasing the incentive to invest in it. The grid rules in TX (again created by the government) force the grid operator to take wind and solar. The term is they are “must run”. This is why we get negative power prices when the wind is blowing, etc. Anyway, the market design has caused some baseload coal and nuclear plants to close, and gas plants in the stack to run less. The economics of running a large power plant when prices are negative is not great. This makes the CO2 emissions graph look good, but it makes the system less reliable. This didn’t happen over night and people were obviously aware of it. Steps can be and were taken to address this, but today we know those steps didn’t cover the actual event that happened.

So, I guess the regulators failed.;)
Thank you for taking time to explain how ERCOT operates! You are a treasure of information.
 
And to think there have been people attributing this TX issue to lack of interconnections.

Interconnections help fix some problems, interconnections cause other problems.

When you’ve got a system that requires real time balancing of thousands of load points with hundreds of generators across potentially congested transmission lines under dynamic conditions sometimes stuff is going to fail. That’s before we even start talking about the fact it’s dependent on a gas production and delivery system that is itself stressed by many of the same sorts of conditions that stress the power system.

I’ve been in the energy infrastructure industry for my entire career, but there are still aspects of each failure I find surprising. Others are fairly predictable. In this one I did not find it surprising that wells freeze up, or instrumentation freezes up because I've seen all that before. What I did find surprising was the inability to roll blackouts as well as I would have expected. I was personally without power for +/- 4 hours then had it for +/- 4 hours for a couple days. This is what I’d consider “rolling blackouts” and is more “inconvenience" than “disaster”. I’ve spoken to people who were without power for as much as 3 days, so I think there is some investigation required as to why that happened. May be localized issues in many cases, but I think there were probably some cases where they rolled the blackout on and then found they couldn’t roll it off. Would be interesting to understand why since I think this may be the big learning here. Effective mitigation is I suspect more cost effective than outright prevention of low probability events.

But then it wouldn’t be entirely surprising if there were a politicized irrational response from politicians. Been known to happen. Politicians are generally better at throwing buckets of money or regulations at the thing that caused the last problem than ensuring a system is efficient with respect to dealing with the many possible things that could cause the next one.
I'd say if dozens or even hundreds of people died it IS a disaster.
 
No, the water table is often too high for them.
They can be designed to be built into a hill, where this isn't a factor. PSE Engineering, out of Oregon, is a specialist in bermed home design. They are designing a bermed home with only 5 feet of berming. Even that would work wonders in preventing a freezing home in winter, and reduce A/C substantially in the summer.
 
I'd say if dozens or even hundreds of people died it IS a disaster.

My point there was that if they had successfully rolled the blackouts 4 hours on 4 hours off for everyone there’s no reason anyone should have died. But there were a lot of people that didn’t have power for days. I don’t know how much of that had to do with Ercot controlled grid issues (generation and transmission) and how much had to do with more localized utility (wires to your house, transformers, etc) issues. If you froze because a tree fell on a transformer down the street from you and took out power on your block then the statewide power shortage due to generation issues didn’t really matter for you. You had a local problem.
 
The failure of the power grid in Texas is the result of a long-term failure of imagination, and the inability to understand how markets work - and don't. ERCOT, the "Electric Reliability Council of Texas" (oh, the irony, it burns!), "manages" the electric grid for 90% of Texans (75% of its land area) and operates free of federal oversight. As their own website puts it "Founded in 1970, ERCOT is an independent, not-for-profit organization responsible for overseeing the reliable and safe transmission of electricity over the power grid serving most of Texas. As the Independent System Operator (ISO) since 1996, ERCOT has been the broker between competitive wholesale power buyers and sellers. The ERCOT ISO also provided the platform upon which Texas' electric utility industry made the transition to retail competition on Jan. 1, 2002." (Given their own press, they failed.)

And therein lies the problem: ERCOT sees itself not as a producer, but as a broker. "This isn't the state's first rodeo with widespread blackouts amid unseasonable cold, however. The Texas power grid is designed to independently manage hot summers, not really cold winters. But "what has sent Texas reeling is not an engineering problem," Will Englund reports at The Washington Post. "It is a financial structure for power generation that offers no incentives to power plant operators to prepare for winter. In the name of deregulation and free markets, critics say, Texas has created an electric grid that puts an emphasis on cheap prices over reliable service." The architect of Texas' electricity market says it's working as planned. Critics compare it to late Soviet Russia. (The Week)

That dichotomy of views encapsulates what is wrong in Texas, and why The parts of Texas not on its ERCOT power grid appear to have weathered the freeze with few outages (The Week). "Weatherizing power generation and extraction equipment is voluntary in Texas". Because of that, producers have "deferred" maintenance/upgrades in favor of more profitability, and the State has encouraged such behavior.

What's worse, they have refused to see the problem. "William Hogan, the Harvard global energy policy professor who designed the system Texas adopted seven years ago, disagreed, arguing that the state's energy market has functioned as designed. Higher electricity demand leads to higher prices, forcing consumers to cut back on energy use while encouraging power plants to increase their output of electricity. "It's not convenient," Hogan told the Times. "It's not nice. It's necessary."

Texas consumers disagree.
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Well, at least the totally government owned and controlled municipal water systems held up!
 
Lessons learned, from three days in the cold and dark.
Find a way to operate the gas furnace from the generator, (It does not like an extension cord)
Keep a deep cycle battery and inverter handy and charged up.
The next gas grill, needs a side burner.

maybe this will help maybe not... use the shortest extension cord possible, and buy the biggest gauge cord you can find: at least 10 gauge wire. You may know that the number gets lower, as the wire gets bigger. I’ve had a hard time with generators on job sites (running jackhammers and tools that draw a lot of power, and this has helped.
 
Keep it simple! Texas failed to assess the risk to the people because of corporate greed.

It's the American way and it doesn't need long paragraphs to explain it.

Which is an unfair assessment. The Texas electric providers now have to compete with each other for customers and Americans typically want cheap prices. So it's not just saying corporate greed, but cheap Americans. In some cases, you get what you pay for and that may forgo winterization which winter storms of this magnitude are very rare.
 
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