Amazon warns Texas: Don’t pass bill that would drive up wind power costs
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
This article is about how the Texas legislature wants to double down on its "wind is the problem" lie by shifting the costs of establishing grid stabilization services exclusively to renewable energy producers in order prop up the profits of natural gas producers. A couple of companies, including Amazon, wrote a letter calling this plan stupid and unfair. I wouldn't expect to Texas legislature to care seeing how the state murdered through negligence more than 100 people to prop up energy producer profits already.
Hopefully the national infrastructure bill will pass and then the incentives for building more renewables will be too great to ignore regardless of whatever BS the state legislature tries to pull.
Lets look at this from another prospective. Yes renewables are great and cheap, Texas has the highest renewable energy production in the country. But by relying on renewable energy means you also need to have large amounts of fossil fuel capacity that is sitting idle, just in case renewable production falls off. Having fossil fuel plants with idle capacity is very expensive. This is the hidden cost of renewable energy and why even though wind/solar power is cheaper than natural gas, grids with lots of wind/solar power have very expensive electricity. I'm looking at you Germany.
You don't need fossil fuel plants sitting idle. You need to increase energy storage capacity which according to the article state policy makes difficult to pursue. So yeah Texas is just propping up fossil fuel profits at the expense of renewables with its plan.
I read that in the article too but I don't follow their logic. Part of Texas' deregulation is that the wholesale electric price goes up and down depending on supply and demand. There is an enormous difference in day vs night demand and price. If you have a large battery system you can sell high and buy low and make tons of money.