Almost three years since the deadly Texas blackout of 2021, a panel of judges from the First Court of Appeals in Houston has ruled that big power companies cannot be held liable for failure to provide electricity during the crisis. The reason is Texas’ deregulated energy market.
The decision seems likely to protect the companies from lawsuits filed against them after the blackout. It leaves the families of those who died unsure where next to seek justice.
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This week, Chief Justice Terry Adams issued the unanimous opinion of that panel that “Texas does not currently recognize a legal duty owed by wholesale power generators to retail customers to provide continuous electricity to the electric grid, and ultimately to the retail customers.”
The opinion states that big power generators “are now statutorily precluded by the legislature from having any direct relationship with retail customers of electricity.”
State motto should be “Welcome to Hell.”
I live here. I agree.
I wish this state would split into multiple smaller states. Not all of us who live here are conservative nut jobs. Let us have our autonomy from the red counties.
They know they need the entirety of the size of the state to overcome any of the larger metro areas. Break that up and they’ll lose the power & prestige it brings in the Electoral College. They’ll never give that up, hence the massive voter suppression.
fun little thought experiment: Texas secedes from the US but then the metro centers secede from Texas and rejoin the US (Dallas taking banking with them, Austin taking the capital, San Antonio taking the Alamo, …) – we can let them keep scenic Midland and Odessa, but Big Bend National Park and Johnson Space Center as well as all the military bases are federal property …
Oh yah I’m all in, but then to drive to any other area I’d have to cross into the badlands. Can we take the interstates too with the big cities?
well they were paid for with federal tax dollars and we know how much Texans love paying taxes …
My thought as well. Let’s do this!
Even Austin?
That guy with all the exes who live in Texas better be worried because Hell is freezing over.
No worries, that’s why he hangs his hat in Tennessee, which probably comes with its own issues.
Next to his child bride
Is Tennessee one of those states? Can never understand how the “save the children” crowd and the “marry ‘em too young to know better” crowd intersect.
Because they don’t want to “save the children” for the sake of the children but for the sake of their fragile egos that can’t handle the idea that their wife might have had other experiences to compare with.
I did a little digging before writing that. Didn’t find all I was looking for, but I did see that only some states explicitly made laws against child marriage, and just in the recent past! Kinda weird. Tennessee wasn’t one of them.
Ah, the Grand Ole Gray Area
I had to live in HEll Paso because I was stationed there in the army. Iraq was better. The good news is I was able to leave.
“Don’t mess with Texas! (We do it enough ourselves)”
“Don’t mess with Texas! (We reserve the right to mess with you)”
When you create an account with a utility, aren’t you creating a contract with them? What happened to contractual duty?
“We are altering the terms. Pray we do not alter them any further.”
“Well, in the land of the fee, your level of freedom is directly proportional to your wealth, and the corporations have… an ungodly amount of wealth… but you… you’re a peasant… you understand?”
“Damn you Deal-breaker Jones! That wasn’t part of the deeeeeeal!!!”
I don’t think it works that way in Texas. There’s a layer of energy resellers who customers create an account with. Those resellers buy energy from the main utility companies and offer different plans. So, there’s no contract between consumer and generator.
Ah yes more middlemen with do nothing jobs ment to reduce corporate liability. The American dream.
Dont disparage what they do. They also add to the price so they can profit. Clearly, added value.
that and how many of their customers can afford (or have the spare time) for a contract lawyer?
It’s a separation between power generation and power delivery. We have the same thing in New York. Someone has to own the actual delivery infrastructure, which in NYC is generally this company called ConEdison. They’ll also provide the generate power for you, but you have the right to switch to other providers. For instance, I could switch to a provider that generated all power from renewable sources, though it is naturally more expensive.
Maybe it works that way in NYC, but here in Indiana, I get one option for a power company. Power, gas, water, sewer, trash collection, all single option. And no, that single option is not a government one because I live outside city limits. Until they laid fiber in this neighborhood last year, I only had one option for internet too.
I won’t pretend to know the regulations in Indiana, but it’s also entirely possible that startup costs or market conditions there don’t really facilitate additional competitors. Utilities tend to become way less efficient as you get less dense, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you don’t really get much competition even if there aren’t strong regulatory barriers. The market being open doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s profitable.
Someone has to own the actual delivery infrastructure,
Do they, though? I hear there’s this neat thing called “public ownership” that works wonders for basic necessities like utilities. And that way you don’t have someone scheming to profit off the things you need to stay alive.
During the Great privatization scam we are promised that the free market would somehow be magically more efficient but it turns out it was a just so they could show profit Hearing in the middle of stuff that had previously been free of it. Worst service and higher prices were universally the result because those profits have to come from somewhere and that’somewhere is you
There are lots of examples of private companies working well as regulated monopolies. The key word is “regulated”, though.
I mean, that isn’t incompatible with this system at all. Government ownership of the delivery system, which I’d fully agree is a good thing and one of the places where state ownership naturally fits, is still ownership.
The government generally isn’t in the energy production business, so either they lock you into a monopoly with an energy producer, or you get to choose one. Either way, it’s the same general system.
We had a Internet Wholesaler in our previous residence who wanted to do the retail side as well. They had the monopoly on the estate we were in, so the ACCC forced them to break up.
With multiple retailers, we suddenly had much better customer assistance, but prices stayed the same.
Ok, then sue the middlemen for failing to withhold their side of the contract.
They can deal with recouping the costs from their shitty suppliers.
They’ll either pressure the suppliers into change, or go out of business handing the liability back to the suppliers.
Wouldn’t the energy broker company want to sue the generator then? Honestly they probably have better lawyers than their customers, anyway.
In my experience contracts are one-sided. The big corpo end of the contract basically has no real power over them but they sure can use their contract to fuck you little guy over. All the contract does is allow a corporation to use state power against you really. No contracts that’s not between equals never truly be fair unless we were to have a public defender system for civil court
Usually this is not the case when you bargin collectively.
Your contact is to pay for the power they provide. It is a regulated field so if something fails, then it is up to the regulators to cover the costs of they want more redundancy but 100 percent guarantees are not possible. Solar doesn’t provide all days and wind can be gone for weeks. Do you think you should be able to sue them for that?
Yes, because they should have energy storage for renewables, such as molten salt, gravity, synthetic methane, and/or electrical batteries, etc
Yet another reason why I’ll never live in Texas.
Remember when Texas was threatening to secede and then everyone realized the state just falls apart when they have any kind of weather besides 90 and sunny.
“Was” threatening to secede? This is from like a week ago: https://www.newsweek.com/texas-independence-usa-secession-1852816
Many southern states aren’t equipped to deal with snow and such, because it doesn’t usually happen. It doesn’t make sense to buy and maintain plows and salt trucks for the one day every 5 years that enough slow falls for it to be necessary. Plus, people only buy 3 season tires for the same reason.
That’s like shitting on England because a bunch of people died in an 80F heat wave.
Who cares about salting and plowing. No one is knocking on Texas for not having the same level of road maintenance as a northern state. If you have major power outages across the state any time there is a strong breeze you have an issue. Texas was literally asking for disaster relief aid to get power back to residents because it got a little too cold. After that, rather than fixing the problem they doubled down and had astronomical prices for power. Now on top of all of that the courts ruled power companies, a utility that is a necessity, don’t actually have to supply you with that necessity.
So your comparison should be more that people in England died when it hit 80F because the water companies couldn’t handle the heat and water stopped being supplied. So yea if that happened everyone should be shitting on England.
They specifically scrapped a system that would have prevented the freezes that have been regularly happening for the last several years.
Sure, a freak storm that happens once a millennia is understandable… but if it starts happening on a regular basis, they’re at fault if they don’t account for it.
considering Texas grid falls apart just as easily when temps get over 100° …
Texans sure must love being abused by their GOP rulers.
Stockholm Syndrome
And Texans should have no legal responsibility to pay taxes.
Or the bill tbh…
Texas is a 4th world shithole.
As a Texan, you’re insulting 4th world shitholes
All this really means is that the life insurance companies won’t be able to transfer their financial liability to the power companies.
Shit states gonna shit state…what a joke of a dump.
Are they allowed to also selectively release electricity to the highest bidder, so that only rich people get power when the system is stressed?
It’s a free open market.
If you lose your power, just switch to another supplier that doesn’t go down.
EDIT: HAHA didn’t know I had to put a obvious /s on this comment, but there ya go.
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“If the air is polluted, just switch to a new air supplier”
Are you under the impression that you can just switch providers in the middle of a blackout?
Wow, guess you guys missed the HARD /s on that one lol
Good thing there’s only one provider in Texas.
It’s like that time I had a seizure and my bad that the ambulance took me to an out of network hospital. My mistake.
It must be wonderful to live in a place that doesn’t monopolize necessities. I have exactly one source of power and I’m not even in Texas. I have one source of Internet, I have one source of water. :(
again… that’s a hard /s
That’s the joke. No one can just switch to a different provider willy nilly.
That’s a wooooosh for me then sorry lol there are too many people that say what you did with a straight face so you never know. Poes law and all that jazz :P
