What would be needed for the RRC to vote against the rate hike? If approved, what can be done to roll it back?
The RRC array of choices are (1) take the securitization deal I described, (2) do a 3-year collection of the $1.1 billion, which increases our bills about 50% for the duration, or (3) collect it all over 1 year, which more than doubles your gas bill. What won't happen is the RRC saying we don't have to pay. Centerpoint has already paid their suppliers and has taken loans to cover it. By law, the commission must allow them to recoup their expenses. In Minnesota (also Centerpoint there), the AG is challenging some of the passthrough by saying the utilities were negligent in their hedging but the Commission will probably reject most of his recommendation. Here in Texas, government is much more business-friendly and gas-friendly so I can't imagine even such a weak resistance as that. We will be paying. If you don't want to pay, don't take any gas at your house. I'm industry so maybe I'm self-interested. But, the solution that I want to see is to restructure gas utilities in Texas the way we did electricity. The narrative from the storm runs completely backward to that with many blaming the competitive market. That's scary to liberals here but the competitive market protected electricity customers. In the market, suppliers take on most or all the wholesale price risk and protect the consumers. Gas utilities should be the same way. It won't save us from the last event, but it would prevent the next one.
Texas' rainy day fund has about $10 billion, which is about the size of the utility disaster if you can't both gas and regulated electric utilities. But I'd be shocked if we used it for this. Besides they already passed a law for the solution -- this securitization deal that will allow ratepayers to pay over a couple of decades with a low interest rate. Brazos Electric Coop (a regulated power utility in central Texas) owed $2 billion and didn't want to pass the cost on to their customers so they declared bankruptcy. If their ploy was successful, Texans outside of their utility territory would have to pay their $2 billion debt. So the legislature wrote the bill in a way to strong arm Brazos into doing the securitization and making their customers pay over a long period of time, just like the Centerpoint gas deal I described for Houston. There's not going to be any wriggling out of this.
If I am a new candidate running for any office I would be running on that single issue. Pocketbook issue, and no incumbent will be able to 'splain away why consumers will be paying for services they didn't receive just because the state and providers weren't prepared for it.
It is time for us all to start taking care of our own power - and gas if possible.......solar here I come. DD
You gotta respect how Abbot slithers his way out of responsibility for these things while continuing to allow companies to do whatever the hell they want. Of course Republicans with the attention span of a fruit fly have already forgotten their outrage about the freeze.
It's a crime if you do that. My coworker was generating his own power 5 years ago but they said that's illegal. He has to return the power he generated from the sun that's saved in his own battery. Abbot does what the electric companies tell him to do. Just like what Trump told him to do a few days ago.
One the one hand, I get it. The big problem in Uri and the risk we still face is that half of Texas' electricity production, plus all our gas utilities are dependent on natural gas production in West Texas, and if they won't weatherize their wells then we face the risk of gas shortages again which will spike prices and cause blackouts. However, on the other hand, you have to remember that in addition to being the backbone of our gas and power utilities in the state, our West Texas E&P industry competes in worldwide oil and gas markets where everything depends on the global price for a barrel of oil. If we increase their production costs with weatherization requirements to serve our domestic utility needs, we raise their break-even point in global markets and Texas' biggest industry becomes less competitive. Thus the opt-out. Likewise, you don't want to put price caps on gas markets that might serve our home heating interests but hurt our oil and gas industry's competitiveness. What most of the media doesn't seem to capture is this dilemma that our gas production industry is serving two masters -- utilities and global markets. So how do you solve it so we're not choosing between unemployment and freezing to death? We need to reduce the utility industry's dependence on gas production. And there are a few ways to do that. You can build more gas storage so we have a bigger buffer before we start buying directly from the well. We can require gas utilities to get more sophisticated about their hedging (most buy month-ahead or spot for their needs). We can build more solar, wind, nuclear, and (gasp) coal to reduce dependence on the price of natural gas. We can increase our capacity to import power over state lines. We can incentivize distributed power (rooftop solar, home battery, backup generation). But per usual, the media fixates on this one simple-minded idea that if we spray some insulating foam on all our gas wells there'd be no problem.
Not so much a conspiracy as it is that journalists are non-experts who get the deference usually reserved for actual experts.
There is a balance between society's needs (jobs included) and private or even gov-sponsored companies' competitiveness. That balance should not be made by the industry, which is the case in TX.
