Nice to have you mirror my point now when you repeatedly suggested it was wrong prior.

You wrongly applying a ruling does not make your case.

I can cite a case wrongly and pretend it applied to this situation.

Good to hear.

Almost perversely it seems the people that got the highest bills are the ones were service failed and went down for hours on end.

Because that was a result of over demand, every minute of service they may have got between shut downs was at a super high premium.

If you had steady service that did not shut down it sounds like your surge in demand was managed.

So the people now being forced to pay the punitive gauging prices are the ones that suffered the most in the cold and dark. Ironic as they are told to 'Pay more for failed service' when it is the very failure that caused the spike in price. The utilities are being rewarded for the failure and passing off what should be their cost to their customers.

That is why you need gov't to fight for the citizens in situations like this, and if Republicans won't do it due to special interest allegiance, Dems need to use whatever limited power they have to do so.

You could say the Dems have a moral imperative to do so.

My guess is that my house maintained electric due to proximity to critical infrastructure. I did go without water a couple days due to the pipe bursting but no big deal.

My rental houses were without electric for 3+ days. It was not managed at all really. I think they tried to bring the neighborhood back up at one point but I'm guessing an important piece of equipment failed in the process resulting in a sustained outage.

Thing is, all of my electric plans are fixed rate (I actually got on new plans a week before the crisis). Never in my life would I have ever considered a variable rate plan. It didn't occur to me that people could get the monstrous bills they got, but I simply would never consider a variable rate plan in the same way I would never consider a variable rate mortgage.

It's certainly a screwy system and I've had more than one electric company try to screw me out of money. When they do, I just stop all payments to them and switch my service to someone else. **** 'em.

The video brought up a great point I didn't think about before. The fastest growing regions of the world (SE Asia, India, and Africa) are on the edge of being able to afford ACs and that's going to dramatically increase their energy consumption.

TLDR: plastics aren't being recycled.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/20...hane-emissions

Brief discussion of methane emissions and some ideas that should be cheap.

Low hanging fruits to reduce carbon emissions.

grizy I am going to repost this article you posted in the BFI here as i think this has pretty significant value to one leg of the climate change debate.

In my view this leading to more electric cars is a tipping point only.

I think the bigger play with better, more cost effective battery storage is a Distributed Energy Grid.

Texas arguably does not have to make the very expensive localized upgrades, to the same extent to their grid, if most homes have a battery wall in their garage that can store hours or a day or more, rationed energy for those critical time usage.

Instead of the gov't giving those utilities huge sums of tax payer money to upgrade (such as he Biden Infrastructure plan is proposing to do now), instead give tax credits to home builders to offset the cost of purchase and installation of an energy wall in every new build. Just defacto, put it in. And give retrofit credits to current home owners.

Plug that all into a smart grid where areas not being impacted by temporary outages can sell their stored power back to the utility for re-distribution elsewhere and also where the utilities can allow for selective shut downs in areas where demand is surging and allow people to access their stored power.

Yes the focus on 'cleaning up the base elements' of this tech need to continue to happen as mining many elements is quite bad but that notwithstanding, this is very positive IMO.





--------------------


Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades

In a few years electric vehicles may cost the same as their combustion-engine counterparts

Such technological progress is crucial for decarbonising the global economy. One of the shortcomings of renewable energy sources is their inconsistency: the sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow. Batteries can help solve this problem by storing up surplus power when supply is high, for use when it is low. A steadier supply of electricity could eliminate the need for “peakers”—generation plants powered by fossil fuels that utilities bring online only when demand rises sharply, for example on hot days when air-conditioners are cranked up. Such carbon-belching facilities, which run only for a few hours each year, are expensive to build and run, raising costs for consumers.

Better batteries are also vital for the continued growth of the electric-car market. Since the Tesla Roadster became the first production vehicle to use lithium-ion cells in 2008, the number of electric vehicles (EVs) on the road has grown to more than 7m. Since batteries currently account for about a third of the price of an electric car, reducing their cost is vital for ensuring that EVs become competitive with conventional ones.

What accounts for lithium-ion batteries’ plunging prices? In a new paper, Micah Ziegler and Jessika Trancik of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology find that the “learning rate”—the fall in price that accompanies every doubling of cumulative battery production—has increased from 20% to 27% in the past few decades. So every time output doubles, as it did five times between 2006 and 2016, battery prices fall by about a quarter. This phenomenon is driven in part by economies of scale: as more batteries are made, producers can spread out the up-front costs of building factories, and use their influence over suppliers to push for lower prices on crucial inputs. Innovation is also important for cutting costs: Mr Ziegler and Ms Trancik find that a doubling in technological know-how, measured by patent filings, is associated with a 40% drop in price....

https://news.mit.edu/2018/adding-pow...ectricity-0906

https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/...showall%3Dtrue

Very good reading on pretty much all the low-carbon energy sources, their cost effectiveness, and some cost comparisons on the mix we need to implement.

As we charge ahead on expanding battery capacity, it is becoming increasingly obvious batteries themselves have a tremendous environmental impact.

And I think cobalt is an even bigger issue than the lithium highlighted in that video.

Don't know anything about this site, but I found this page interesting:

https://www.earthworks.org/fact-shee...ology%20Sydney.

A bit down the road if it pans out but interesting nonetheless:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...1019090125.htm

Unreliable renewables are environmental disasters in their own right. Nuclear is really our best option (that doesn’t involve undeveloped technologies.) Solar and wind are great under favorable conditions but they can’t provide base load power reliably, at least not without huge costs, much of which will be borne by the environment.

This is true even if you use stuff like hydro storage or whatever you consider “natural.” We are talking about a lot of giant, and permanent, holes in mountains to store a fraction of the power a nuclear plant could generate in the same area.

This is not going to help the global climate issue as well

https://www.iflscience.com/policy/ch...Hrho6gYmnL5fTo

Environmental consciousness, government regulation, and a little innovation aligning business and environmental interests are all at play here.

These are sustainable innovations.

Love it!

More issues in Texas demonstrating why have an 'in-part' decentralized smart grid, with each home having Green energy and a battery wall built in to store and utilize power at peek times could be a potential solution to this problem.



'Unplanned' outages hit Texas power plants in soaring temperatures
One official said he was "deeply concerned" about the number of offline plants.

Officials with Texas' power grid operator pleaded with residents Monday to limit their electrical usage amid soaring temperatures and a series of mechanical problems at power plants.

The appeal, from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, comes four months after deadly blackouts during a winter storm left millions of people without power — and weeks after state legislators passed a package of measures aimed at fixing some of the problems exposed by the storm.

Officials with the nonprofit group, which oversees 90 percent of Texas' energy production, asked residents to set their thermostats higher, turn off lights and avoid using larger appliances until Friday.

A spokeswoman for the group told reporters that the outages accounted for more than 12,000 megawatts, enough to power 2.4 million homes. ...

A senior official with ERCOT, Warren Lasher, said it wasn't clear why there were so many unplanned outages. But he said that the group is "deeply concerned" about the plants that are offline and that a thorough investigation is being conducted to better understand the problems...

It was unlikely that controlled blackouts would be instituted Monday, he said...

Legislators sought this month to strengthen the state's power grid — which isn't subject to federal oversight — through measures that will force companies to winterize parts of the grid deemed critical.

But experts told National Public Radio that the measures aren't enough. One critic told the network that it was an "overstatement" to call new $5,000-per-day penalties for noncompliant companies "a rounding error."

JFC Texas is on the verge of becoming a failed state.

I hope all those people supposedly moving their from California aren't too disappointed that they don't have electricity now.

The power of deregulation first hand as you see the Private power utility opting to pay fines over not meeting some compliance standards over these safety and supply issues.

Pure cost analysis of the short term pain (and deaths) due to small time frame power outages (at worst possible times of deep cold/heat) and the required costs to buttress the system against them.

That is why I stand by my view that Texas (any State) should start requiring now, in all new builds a percent of clean energy along with a battery wall plugged into a smart grid.

Even if each home only had a few hours of energy back up for key prioritized systems that could be used to rotate homes on and off the grid to take the type of pressure off of it that leads to system breakages and outages.

Certainly Texas has an issue with it's power supply/grid that needs to be addressed. Failed state though? Hardly. This is not even the biggest issue affecting Texas right now.

Oh. That certainly speaks well for the state.

Texas is not a failed state because this big problem you are talking about is not even its biggest problem.

I love the internet sometimes.

The biggest problem is due to the US being a failed state, not Texas.

At least Texas is proving how deregulating and privatizing is the way out of all the US problems.

AMIRIGHT?

I particularly love how Texas' private utilities get to enjoy those Texas sized profits in the ~99% of the time when the grid is not under stress and operating normally that translate in to big Texas sized stock and other returns for the Investors but as soon as they have a PREDICTABLE catastrophic failure due to PREDICTABLE weather events they immediately go to the other Texas sized tradition of asking for Big State and Federal bailout money to social that cost amongst average citizens.

The system is working perfectly there. Pull mass profits for ~99% up to the elite few. Socialize massive costs to average citizens.

I mean why would the Shareholders or the Management even consider using profits to build out the necessary infrastructure and protections under that equation? In a pure dollars and cents assessment it makes no sense. Let the system crash, 1% of the time, and let the tax payers pick up the bill along with the lost lives.

Especially since the gov't provides the companies protections against lawsuits for such negligence.

Remove the lawsuit protections, and force the company to 'self insure' by keeping a significant portion of prior years profits in the company to pay for the ramifications of these disasters and suddenly you see a whole new calculus with regards to allowing that risk.

But then that would not be the Texas way, as that would be truly a free market course of action and not a crony capitalism one.

Isnt California having rolling blackouts as well ?