lmao lmao.
Reminder that Texas is a separate grid, which is deregulated and financialized, according to neoliberal ideals of efficiency.
good thing it never gets too hot or too cold in Texas
I would never live in Texas but if I did I would have like 20kW of batteries on the wall of my McMansion’s garage and a generator, they would pay for themselves within a couple years of this bullshit
the inevitable end for those with the wealth to survive the mortgaging of our utilities. you will have to have water treatment too because the water from your municipality or well will not be safe
That is the solution most people go for. Rather than get mad and demand power be a public utility, rugged individualism prevails, everyone who can buys a generator, and the poor get shamed for being idiots for not buying one and deserving to suffer for their mistake. I’m still a bit bitter arguing with people that the government should do basic infrastructure spending on the power grid and being told instead everyone should only look out for themselves. I’m glad I moved out.
Idk about texas but there’s lots of places in amerika where it’s illegal to be off grid, or have your own power generation.
laaaaand of the freeeeeee
Very uncommon Texas W I guess because you can get generators at the hardware store here
Probably after a single price surge, even
fascinating to me that texans can be bled like this in the heat and their minds don’t turn to murder
all those guns to protect themselves from “criminals” and they’re too
-brained to realize that the real criminals robbing them are at the power companyThey do but not the people responsible.
right? like a texan chud is ready to shoot somebody for driving too slow, but when a company is forcing them to pay absurd costs or sweat their balls off…
they can’t countenance the idea of taking revenge
If it weren’t for all those immigrants hogging the air conditioning! - texas
One megawatt can usually power about 800 homes on a normal day but as little as 200 homes on a hot day in Texas.
texas delenda est
You see, this is why solar power can never work. What happens when then sun is up, and—
You have no idea how many times I’ve said this to actual texans
Natural monopolies and all. Gotta shove a market everywhere, even where it makes no sense.
God if only we could harness the power of the sun to power devices that COOL our homes… somebody please get working on a way to make this happen
if someone were so authoritarian that they’d disrupt the free market in this way, President Biden would simply have no choice but to impose tariffs on them to protect American business from such dangerous foreign technology
Maybe the real red sun in the sky was the friends we made along the way
I hate talking about solar here because you hear the dumbest fucking arguments against it that it makes me want to get violent.
It can’t support all our energy needs? It’s better than using 100% fossil fuels though you have to start somewhere.
What about when the suns not out? BITCH ITS FUCKING TEXAS
I love free market basic utilities because of the informed choice you have as a consumer to choose to use it when you hear about price changes before you’re charged
I hate it here. Texas is a hellhole. There are zero redeeming qualities about living in this state. It’s too hot, the environment is ugly and barren, every city is a concrete jungle, flat and full of parking lots and nothing else.
If my power goes out at the peak of the heat, I guess I’m killing an ercot exec?
every city is a concrete jungle, flat and full of parking lots and nothing else
I visited Dallas once. Stayed in a hotel for a weekend-long event. Wanted to go get food. “Hey, I can see stuff right across the street, let’s walk.” The street is a fucking massive highway with no crossings unless you walk like a mile in either direction to get to an intersection and then a mile back to get to the food. Repeat to get back to the hotel.
I had the exact same experience in Dallas. Do we work for the same company or is that just how Dallas is everywhere.
That’s just metropolitan Texas. Houston is just as bad if not worse. Austin is a lot better though but only because the bar is pretty low.
Having power go out during peak summer never used to happen. Texas sucks ass, but genuinely we produce enough energy that we often sell it to the other energy grids from what I understand. We shouldn’t really have any brown/blackouts at all other than the freezes.
Summer probably wasn’t as hot (as 2023 and probably 2024)
On an hourly basis, ERCOT load had never exceeded 80,000 megawatts (MW) before this summer. Not only was a record 85,464 MW load set on Aug. 10, but demand breached 80,000 MW on 42 days between June 1 and Aug. 31
16 percent growth in two years will cause challenges for any infrastructure
Population and GDP cannot explain peak summer load growth of 9 percent in 2022 and 7 percent in 2023
Ercot has been saying this for almost a decade at this point though. I’m not arguing it isn’t hotter than it used to be, I’m saying it’s more likely that they’re lying about the reasoning for it. Like their lack of modernization of the infrastructure in general.
ERCOT is a bazinga system operator set up by the characters from looney tunes. They’re the only system operator without a forward capacity market. Everyone else pays uneconomic reserve plants money just to stay connected and ready to respond to demand spikes, but the brain trust at ERCOT decided it would be cheaper for rate payers to not do that. Turns out it is until it isn’t, and the only way they have to balance supply with demand is to curtail demand with eye bleedingly high real time prices since there isn’t enough slack in the system.
I would be surprised if there isn’t any manipulation of the market.
Some of my state’s SOE electricity generators got sued by the federal government for price manipulation on the national energy market (and then they gave up and changed the rules to try and stop it)
The cost being measured in MWh - does that mean that this is the production cost, and that the KWh rate that people are paying is even higher?
This is $.688 per KWh, which is high, but like only about 4 times the cost of my regular priced electricity in my region.
Does this jumping 1600% mean that normally electricity is less than $.04 per KWh. That is incredibly low! There’s no way that what people pay for electricity in Texas. This must be production costs, right?
it’s wholesale costs, not costs of production, there’s at least one more layer of middlemen in there before the consumer gets anything. Avg residential rate is 14.3 cents/kWh (but businesses only pay 8.7)
Seems costs per KWh at the cheapest for the consumer in Texas is $0.112 according to this website
I can only imagine the average Texan billiard ball brain take:
: blame capitalism
: blame being woke
“So much for climate change!”
Freedom isn’t free honey.
look kiddo battery tech and national grids are nice but have you thought about shareholders?Oh I’ve thought about them alright
Who could have predicted this once in a lifetime event
