Comment by Traster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Traster | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think you’re missing the wood for the trees a bit here. Firstly, the scale of the incident in TX went for beyond what could be handled by demand management through price controls anyway- most of the supply isn’t designed to handle those temperatures. No rate was going to increase supply (which is obviously half of the equation). On the demand side it’s a much more complex question than demand being inelastic. No matter what the price Ted Cruz was going to continue to heat his hot tub (in case he wanted a dip once he’d flown back from Cancun) whilst those who are in poverty are likely to have ended up unable to hear their homes simply because they couldn’t afford the price. And that’s the problem with using price- there is a minimum amount of electricity people need, and some people won’t be able to afford that minimum before others even think about turning off the flood lights on their tennis court.

Essentially the effect of what you’re saying is poor people would be priced out of an essential utility to ensure rich people get a stable supply.

>Essentially the effect of what you’re saying is poor people would be priced out of an essential utility to ensure rich people get a stable supply.

No, that's not the case. The entire point of a market system is to encourage people to use the limited resources on the most critical needs first. However, since there is a fixed rate culture the end result is that everyone wastes energy on non essential needs.

There simply aren't enough rich people on the planet to steal all the 75GW and even if they did they would be broke in the end. I don't know where you got that idea. The rich are in the minority. Also, you're forgetting that rich people will waste more energy if their rates are artificially kept lower.

Besides that, supply IS elastic in the longer term. So if the rich were able to bid the price up, there would be folks able to make a bunch of money selling power to them, reducing the cost. And that opportunity should be available to most people. If we had standardized feed-in capability on smart meters, whole house generators, solar roofs and batteries, or even cars could sell electricity on the grid when the wholesale price got insane.

Poor folks would be insulated from the large swings in price by the 25-50% guaranteed price portion of the power supply. (And you could make the price guarantee portion progressive by making it a constant 3kW (averaged over an hour) or whatever regardless of house size, so smaller houses would have much more of their electricity at a fixed rate than larger houses.)

there are stories of many empty office buildings fully powered with the lights on throughout the whole thing. Its possible if they were on a more price sensitive system those commercial property owners would have opted to shut off more of the power.

We can have a totally different attitude towards commercial property, I agree.

You need to keep in mind what caused that.

In Austin's cade, Austin Energy built out way too much off of essential circuits. Office buildings stayed lit because they trunked off a circuit feeding medical centers, emergency services, that type of thing.

So the only place Austin Energy could go for load shedding was their residential customer base. Even then; they didn't execute true "rolling" blackouts, because that implies dividing the supply of power you have somewhat evenly across your entire customer population in a reasonable time based multiplexing scheme so that everyone gets their chance to run the heat. To minimize the amount of time people go without any heat, and at regular intervals so people can plan their consumption.

Can't speak for other metroplexes, and the co-op I get power from did a perfect job.

If they were (and knew they were) being charged $9/kWh for days on end, the occupants of those buildings would have shed the wasteful lighting loads for you.

Precisely.

Residential areas should maybe be the ONLY places where a fixed rate would be allowed. Everywhere else (commercial, industrial, etc) should have to have real-time pricing. That would reduce the swings in price since demand would be much more elastic.

This would have the potential for nice second-order effects.

I'm thinking about places in AZ/NV where some companies and even some municipality groups (i.e. bureaucratic/permitting type) have moved towards four 10 hour days instead of five 8 hour days.

This is a bit better for those employees QOL (since they get 3 day weekends all the time) and also benefited the employers since they could lower their power consumption for an additional day.

Or could cause a clawback of some of those by companies realizing that if they went back to 5x8, one of their days would be cheaper power because the 4x10 companies wouldn’t be operating on one of those days.

Or “if we took Wednesdays off instead of Fridays, we’d benefit from Friday power being cheaper than Wednesday power”.

I still think market-aware power metering is a good thing for large users.

Well, you’re making my point for me! With better control and response over energy usage, the power companies would be able to cut power to non-essentials, and businesses would be both incentivized and empowered to do it themselves voluntarily.

Yeah, calling them “rolling” was a complete joke. Many people in Austin (like me) lost power for a solid 3 days, while low-rise, wealthy Westlake was almost entirely untouched.

If you had told people in Texas that it’s going to cost $200 per hour to run their heat, people would have responded by dramatically cutting consumption and the blackouts would not have been required.

Now that said, having an electric system where this is necessary is itself a market failure.

They did: https://abc11.com/griddy-gridy-texas-power-bills-what-is-ene...

They couldn't.

Either people still got hit by massive bills (thousands or tens of thousands of dollars), or they cut usage (voluntarily or otherwise) and froze to death or poisoned themselves trying not to.

Municipal water and sewerage perations couldn't function. Pipes froze and burst. Massive damage precipitated by underprovisioning, risk-shifting to the most vulnerable, and a gamble that lost.

Life ain't textbook neat.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com