Texas power prices soar 20,000% as brutal heat wave sets off emergency::On Wednesday evening, spot electricity prices topped $5,000 per megawatt-hour, up more than 200 times from Wednesday morning.
“The system is working as intended. The shareholders thank you.”
This state is such a shithole.
Wait, I have seen that before. I have a déjà-vu
EDIT: so it’s 5$ kWh, current price in France is 0.2€ kWh for comparison. Makes a real point for energy-efficient computers/software!
so it’s a publicly traded commodity. are there texasmegawatts or what? are there less texasmegawatts then before? because if not, this is how it works. they gain capital, can cheaper lend capital, buy efficient texasmegawattsfacilities.
Because Texas refuses to connect its grid to the federal grid, yes, there’s effectively texasmegawatts, and they’re fucking expensive right now because the governor keeps refusing to let the power companies properly prepare for devastating weather.
Texas is connected to the Eastern (Florida to Canada) grid, the Western (Cali to Canada) grid, and a Mexican grid not part of the US/CA system via tie-ins. It is the only state in the continental US with it’s own grid, which was not a smart decision (cough cough feb 2021). The most outrageous part was that they could have bought power from Mexico, east, or west and import it via those tie-ins during Feb 2021 but chose not to. Power was out for millions for over a week in freezing temperatures. Fuck Texas. Fuck CenterPoint Energy.
Additional Information: Besides Texas, Quebec and Alaska have their own grids as well. Alaska is the only grid without any tie-ins.
… what?
Don’t worry everyone. The free market will take care of this for sure! Deregulated private companies always have the best interests of the consumers at heart!
The free market is trying to supply renewables, they are cheaper, more flexible and simple to deploy, the free market loves that shit.
It’s vested interests fighting it at every turn that’s the issue.
Yeah, those vested interests are part of the free market.
You don’t get to cherry pick this
It doesn’t seem like a very “free” market with lobbyists, subsidies, and pet politicians propping up the establishment entities in every corner of the market. Too big to fail and all that.
I think that other comment was sarcasm
But how do we know? They didn’t use the sarcasm font!
Waaaaat? The Texas power grid is price gouging again?!? Who could have foreseen this??? After all that work they put into the power grid after the last time this happened? It’s almost like someone should regulate this power grid or something.
It not price gouging, it’s “free market economics”. You don’t have your MBA yet, do you?
Its trickle down economics, the sweat trickling down your back
FREEDOM! SO FREE! Free to die baking in the sunnnn
So it is some between 2.5c to $5 kwh. Is this even possible? I scanned linked 2 pages could not find any price chart.
I am wondering if similar can happen in stock market, a penny stock no one is trading, you decide to buy/sell 1 share $10000 to yourself. Then suddenly every owner become millionaire? At least on paper, right, right? /s
What you’re describing is a pump and dump scheme. In any market where there is low volume, either in terms of units or value, it is possible that a wealthy individual buys a large enough share of the available item to make the price jump up a bunch. Then when other people buy to get in on the next bitcoin/NFT/GME craze, often motivated by person A, that first person can then sell to the next wave.
What is weird about the power grid is that A) electricity has to be used at the time of purchase so you couldn’t resell it and B) there are often power plants specifically for spikes in demand (called peaker plants) that rely on those moments to jump in and produce to make their profit, keeping things under control. However if you’re the Texas grid, which is isolated from any other electric grid, you can just ignore obvious signs that more power is needed and everytime demand spikes you make a bunch of profit and super promise you’ll fix it for the next time
Contrary to what clickbait articles lead you to believe these spikes are incredibly brief. https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/systemwideprices
I’m really not sure how else an electrical grid is supposed to artificially encourage lowering demand than to fluctuate pricing. Lots of new appliances now can connect to the grid and shut themselves down temporarily when costs are high, this is an opt-in system that without pricing tied to it most people would ignore. If you need to use electricity at high demand time it had better be important.
And yes I realize in an ideal world every electrical grid would be 10,000% oversized and be able to handle infinite demand. That is unfortunately not the world we live in.
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Emergency? You mean kind of emergency where I have to call my naval architect to lengthen my new summer yacht by another half a football field because I need to spend this profit windfall. -Power Co execs in TX
Someone has to take Ted Cruz to Mexico.
That only happens when it gets cold
Good thing we brought all those bitcoin miners to “incentivize” the power companies to improve the grid. And then we give them millions in energy credits to make them stop so we don’t have a total meltdown.
10/10 plan, there.
Texas talks a lot of shit for a state that can’t keep the lights on.
Even motel 6 can do that
We have a saying in germany about our state owned railway operator:
The four biggest enemies of punctuality are Summer, Winter, Autumn and Spring.
Maybe the same is true for energy reliability and ERCOT?
The stars at night Are big and bright Clapclapclapclap Cause we got rolling blackouts
Friday Night
Lights
At ERCOT’s request, the Biden administration declared a power emergency in Texas on Thursday, waiving some air-pollution rules so generators in the state could produce more electricity.
Why not just say “yes, but only if you promise to put in more clean energy, drop gas, and connect to say, I dunno, the fucking international grid, you fucking dumbasses?”
If you have the means, move out of the state before anything worse happens from your galaxy brain politicians, who would seem to rather kill you than see you have normal living conditions. Jesus.
No doubt that the climate science deniers of Texas will struggle on…
Impossible. Isn’t Texas the richest, most developed place on earth?
Was I lied to???11!
And they will still continue to vote against their interests.
They absolutely deserve it, too. Dumbfuck Texans.
What the actual fuck?!?
