“The Grid is fixed.” ERCOT warns of rolling blackouts.

Are we ready for the rolling tinman outages we will suffer on the BBS though?

 

Yes.

 

ERCOT some new ride at Disneyland?

DO SUMTHIN NEWSOM!!!! U SUCK

 

I'd told y'all it's going to take a few years to fix. Power plants need to be built. They did some preliminary fixes around winterization, but the main "fix" was to be a mechanism that compensates capacity and that hasn't even been implemented yet. PUCT has a plan but Patrick wants the legislature to pass some alternate solution. Legislative session ends this month and then we will start having a plan to implement that - if built right - will incentivize enough generation a few years later.

 

While it’s understandable it will take a few years it’s not like we had no idea that Texas was undergoing a population explosion.

Economic and population growth requires infrastructure, water, and electricity.

 

Good news for musk, solar, and whole house generators

 

Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyit. Tinman has a generator in case of blackout. Through snow, sleet, rain, or hail, the alt right troll-isms will never fail!

 

How and how much should I charge my neighbors to come over to my house during an outage to use our standby generator?

 

As long as you don't shoot them when they ring your doorbell, they should be grateful enough to pay any price.

 

Wait til the subsidence hits. GOOD LUCK

 

Sure. While markets elsewhere had sophisticated auctions for capacity (paying generators to exist and be ready), Texas has proudly rolled with an energy-only market, believing that generators would be happy to exist and be ready for the chance to generate when called. The winter storm finally killed that presumption.

 

If anyone was interested. The plan to incentivize more construction of electric generation concocted by the PUCT, which was called the Performance Credit Mechanism (PCM), would pay generators for the promise of delivering a certain amount of electricity and punish them if they fail to deliver. Legislators told them they wanted a say in the matter. And now they have.

They passed a bill (which I expect Abbott will sign) that allows the PCM to go forward, but will put a cap of $1 billion on the annual cost. Estimates of how much it would end up actually costing varied widely, but the most extreme estimate was $5.7 billion. So the cap will protect consumers from the cost of reliability getting out of control, but there is also risk that the cap will hobble the PCM altogether because generators would be afraid of not getting paid and will not make the investment in new generation.

The other thing they did was more socialism. They created a loan and subsidy program for companies that want to build dispatchable power plants right away. Its been a bit buried in the news, but corporations are pretty good at sniffing out free money. To get the biggest subsidies, plants need to be built by 2026, so expect a lot more new gas-fired plants to go up in the next couple of years. However, because of the cap on the PCM, we might just see these new plants replace old ones instead of being additive. Fortunately, if the only thing we managed to get wrong was the size of the cap, it can be easily adjusted in future years with the market structure we build only superficially impacted.

 

Here we go with these mother****ers...

 

Will Greg Abbott raise his thermostat? I doubt it.

 

You do understand, right?, that voluntary conservation requests isn't a uniquely ERCOT thing. All utilities across the country will issue these on high demand days.

 

It’s more of the Texas rhetoric of free markets… anti government….. private sector….. culture wars……

 

Yeah, I get it, but as we saw with the big freeze, we don't have the backup plans other states have.