That's too bad, they should have built more efficient plants that could place the costs of negative externalities on the parties creating them and profiting from them, rather than passing them off on other innocent parties. A power company's right to higher profit margins is no more important than your right to not eat a mercury sandwich. Good to see the governmenet correcting another obvious market failure.
Anyone says "mercury emissions" and the sheeple freak out. It's so frustrating. I work for a TRANSMISSION company by the way, not a power plant company like NRG so this really is just a social service issue for me as it doesn't affect money for me at all.
Nope, I have my servants hand deliver me spring water from the Himalayas because I'm soooo rich from killing babies for profit.
That's not overreaching, that's finally getting rid of ancient "grandfathered" units that produce far more pollutants. If anything was "overreaching", it was the insistence of these companies that new regulations designed to protect the public did not apply as long as they never upgraded a damn thing to keep the profit margin as high as possible.
I think we should wait for the announcement. If they put in stringent requirements and a short timeline, ERCOT reliability would be compromised. Many dirty plants would be mothballed and peak demand in the summer could not be met. This last summer, they had to recommission 4 mothballed plants to help satisfy demand. It could also have a large impact on electricity prices, especially in the South Zone. We already had this year several instances of price spikes where retailers were buying electricity at $3,000/MWh (while being paid by the customer at $100-$150 for that power) on some intervals. That shortage will be good for generators who are still in business because they've mostly been losing money the last couple of years. The South Zone already has a market liquidity and congestion problem, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn they run some dirty plants, so potentially a crisis could develop there. But, assuming the EPA gives us enough lead time to comply, the business case for building new clean plants will be compelling and I think we would get new generation to satisfy peak demand. Generation companies will foresee the increase in power prices from the reduction in supply and be confident they can make money. And, with ERCOT's new nodal structure (which is supposed to provide more localized market prices to reflect the state's demand on a much more granular level then before -- 1000s of nodes vs the old way of having 4 price zones), power companies should be able to better target their investments to maximize reliability. And, to be realistic, even if your worst fears are realized and the EPA mandates tough standards in a short amount of time, they will likely struggle to get Texas to comply quickly anyway. They'll push back, 'interpret' language to makes things easier, and so on. Rolling black-outs would be the last resort.
Isn't your stance sort of fear mongering as well? ZOMG we're going to be a third world countryyy!!1! Worst thing I see happening is prices going up to a point where margins will be high enough for a company to invest in a new plant.
JuanValdez, in your opinion, do you think the Nodal Market reorganization really has helped in this regard the past year? I have to do a lot of extra work in terms of grid model management to make the outages more visible and it's hard to tell from this engineering side if all this work is bearing fruit yet in the market.
That's fair, but it is true that as it stands, there WILL be rolling black-outs if these rules are enforced stringently without a lot of lead time, as JuanValdez states. I'm just opposed to the principle of overreacting to anything to do with environment and sacrifice electrical reliability just for the sake of people feeling warm and fuzzy inside without actual proof that it's helping the environment.
You are indirectly arguing about global warming using the grid issue as your talking point. I think this is wrong. Global warming shouldn't be dismissed because we don't have the infrastructure to dismiss it. The threat is real and most scientist agree with it. Change sucks but it has to be done. But back on the issue of blackouts...our current increase in usage rate will result in higher which will do 3 things... 1) Reduce demand as folks will be like WTF at their bills 2) Natural Gas turbines will be turned on longer for the expanded peak hours 3) Investors in the long run will pour more money into renewables as they see oil and gas prices climb. We will not experience the large scale grid issue because of this. You are correct about the lead time (but this is in terms of years, not months) but I think #2 will make up for the time delay in #3 happening.
I'm not sure. My company does play in upstream, but I work in downstream, so my exposure is tangental. It is something we stay cognizant of. It's only been a year so far, so I think it'll take the market some time to catch up. But, I don't really know it will behave as planned which is why I was careful to say "should."
I don't think anybody is saying that the companies emitting these pollutants shouldn't have to compensate the people harmed by it. It just doesn't make much sense to cut off production with legislation when these issues should be handled by the courts. Legislators should never make companies exempt from this sort of litigation either (and often that is the case).
