The Venn Diagram of Texas taxpayers and Texas utility bill payers is basically a circle. What difference does it make if the state picks up the tab or the cost is passed through on utility bills? There is one key difference, actually, and one we should be sure to use. The way the market is built, shareholders of energy companies absorb some of the profits and losses. If the state swoops in with a bailout, some shareholders will be spared losses but those who profited still keep profits. I would prefer not to personally subsidize some shareholder. So, no bailouts please. You and I will pay our portion, either in the tax bill or on the utility bill, so don't let others off the hook. If you mean the Griddy customers, it's a distraction that I wish people would let go of. They represent half of one percent of the residential market. And half of their customers lost power during the event and don't have high bills. Griddy is defunct and all their customers given to other companies (without the customary credit check). Their business model will be outlawed. Griddy is suing ERCOT to reduce those bills for their customers. Texas is suing Griddy for misleading customers and trying to get refunds to them. There's plenty of people fighting on those customers' behalf. There are really much bigger problems lingering from this mess than that. Well, don't get carried away. Some gas plants couldn't perform due to lack of gas. But some just failed all on their own because of the cold weather. And, just as some power producers failed for lack of gas, some gas producers failed for lack of power. I heard from one gas company that said they had a lot of gas in storage that could have gone to power plants, but the utility hadn't identified them as critical infrastructure so they were curtailed and didn't have electricity to run the pumps to move the gas. You're right gas sits outside the industry, but it is at the moment such a critical vendor that we can't really have energy security without considering the resiliency of the gas supply. They recognized that in the 2011 report everyone likes to point at now, but the 2011 report didn't actually ask for any significant change in the gas industry. And if you listen to the Railroad Commission now, you'll despair of anything being done this time either.
Not every Texan got an electric bill with 5 zeroes attached to it, the same way when a hurricane hits not every Texan gets 5 feet of water in their house.
Good lord. The retail customers who got stuck with those bills number maybe 10,000. Totaling less than $200 million all in. Centerpoint Energy, Houston's gas provider, lost $2.5 billion. Atmos Energy, which serves gas in North Texas, lost another $2.5 billion. Texas Gas Service, in central Texas, another $2.2 billion. San Antonio's regulated electric utility, CPS Energy, lost $1 billion. Brazos Electric Coop $1.8 billion. You're missing the story. All those regulated utilities will pass their costs to their customers with the explicit blessings of the state of Texas, spread out over ten years. We are all going to pay. It'll be 3 to 4 figures instead of 5, but because gas service is still a regulated utility, all Texans with gas service (and some with electric) will pay their share. Why are we worried about socializing the costs of 10,000 households when millions of households are impacted?
I wonder how Pedernales Electric Coop (PEC) did financially. Here in SW Austin, at least in our neighborhood, we had very few outages, usually an hour or so in length. That's a big "thumbs up" to PEC. Meanwhile, our daughter, who lives in NW Austin, didn't have power for at least 4 days straight. Late in the Blizzard and after, we had far more trouble getting clean water from Austin Water. Their problems, of course, were caused by not having electricity. Meanwhile, Abbott, Patrick, and Paxton are doing everything they can to see if they can make people forget about just how badly the state was "prepared" for this winter disaster.
The forecast for that week indicated a peak of over 75 GW. In previous years the peak was more like 55 GW. 75+ GW is so high that it actually rivals Texas's summer peak. Combined with a weather forecast for February that missed the cold weather (and probably led to more power plants going offline for maintenance) and cold weather that usually weakens wind significantly, it's not surprising that the grid was fighting for its life. ERCOT probably should have started rolling blackouts on Saturday.
I've been checking them but haven't seen a disclosure yet. Probably if it was expensive for them, we'd hear by now. But, in general, the munis and coops are not as transparent as the shareholder-owned companies. Austin Energy didn't say how they did until this week. As for blackouts, the volume of the blackouts had little to do with the capabilities of the local distribution grids. They mostly stayed intact. They were ordered to curtail customers by ERCOT to reduce ERCOT-wide demand. I don't know PEC's particulars, but I would think they'd have cut roughly the same percentage of customers as other utilities did. Looks to me like it was the midstream gas companies who were taking risk on gas delivery.
Thanks, JV. Glad they're likely doing OK. We've been very satisfied with their service and they're less expensive than the City of Austin's electric utility. The reason we have them is that the neighborhood was outside of Austin when we bought our place. It was considered far from downtown Austin and the Capital. You could hear cows mooing in the distance after midnight and the night sky was full of stars. After 25+ years, the cows are long gone and the night sky is obliterated, thanks to far too much light from the businesses and freeways now in the area. We're considered fairly close in these days, but a commute takes about 3 times as long. Ironical. ;-)
