Texas has a great system under normal conditions that has incentivized a ton of solar and Panhandle wind, but it is not built for severe conditions.
Public utilities are essential services. “Great when times are good” literally is the worst type of arrangement. Having a public entity that exits to drive private profit is disgusting and a great example of the insanity of modern political thought.
I don’t know that it’s “great” for anyone except the guys in the energy market who see the upside from volatility. The rates I see right now are higher than what my local utility charges, about on par with our all-renewable option, and we have no downside scenario where the prices skyrocket or the power goes out with no accountability. I do appreciate the amount of wind power (and hope the politicians don’t stymie that industry) but it doesn’t appear to be especially unique in that growth.
Name 10 other states with faster adoption of renewable energy in the past 20 years.
California and...?
Doesn't seem like it's that common to me.
If you want per capita renewables, Iowa and Kansas beat both Texas and California.
> Iowa reached an impressive clean energy milestone in 2020, according to data recently released from the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Iowa produced the highest percentage of electricity by wind of any state, at 59.6%. This figure represents a sharp increase from 2019, which had the state at 42% electricity from wind.
> Although Texas has the greatest installed wind turbine capacity of any state, it provided just under 20% of the state’s electricity in 2020. Iowa’s wind generation capacity of 11,660 megawatts in 2020 provided just shy of 60% of the state’s electricity. [1]
Iowa's grid is almost done changing. Texas is playing catch up.
[1] https://www.iaenvironment.org/newsroom/energy-news/iowa-near...
If it's common there should be dozens of examples. There's 50 states, there should be plenty of examples.
There's literally several states with >80% renewables and one with 99.7%. More than a dozen way ahead of Texas. All you had to do was look up a single Wikipedia page to check your argument. Good luck with your goalposts.
The challenge was "Name 10 other states with faster adoption of renewable energy in the past 20 years." Please point to where you've answered that.
In any case, my point was simply that if we’re seeing a system with recurring widespread life-threatening outages described as great, I think it’d need to be almost free or 100% non-polluting to balance that out. The 2021 outage alone was responsible for hundreds of deaths and damages in the hundreds of billions range, so I kinda expect better than “a top competitor to CAISO”.
You can play here https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...
> The biggest winners were companies with access to supplies, including leading energy trader Vitol, gas suppliers Kinder Morgan (KMI.N), Enterprise Products Partners (EPD.N) and Energy Transfer (ET.N), oil giant BP plc (BP.L), and banks Goldman Sachs (GS.N), Bank of America (BofA) (BAC.N) and Macquarie Group (MQG.AX).
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/results-tally-up-bil...
My argument is that splitting the market up like that has been better to traders than Texas consumers.
Thought renewables were cheaper than fossil fuels?
No. It's not winter proof, it's not interconnected with it's neighbors.
It absolutely is not a "great system". It's a controlled system for its own greed.
It's downright shocking the difference in frequency between power losses I experienced on the regular in Texas vs. what my out of state family experience. I started keeping track of it a couple years ago. My family can have dozens of sporadic outages in a span of time with 100% uptime for me in TX. Smaller, less interconnected networks can be a godsend. Hell, it's a lesson that's immortalized in our interstate highway system.
...Then again, I suppose that there's the case to be made that more frequent outages keep your response teams sharp. There is a drop off among Operations people whereby knowledge tends to end up getting forgotten when too much time passes between completion of repeated periodic tasks.
In my family while growing up we kept flashlights and candles handy, and us kids were (very lightly) drilled on where to find them when the power went out. And again, this was in the middle of the metro, not out in any rural parts.
Interestingly, I've found most problems seem to be metro-centric in Texas. Austin, for instance, in patticular has a horribly architected power network, where much of downtown's skyscrapers and what not share a circuit that is never load shed, leaving only the residentials to be. This escalated to tragic consequences during the Winter storms of a few years ago when everyone was told to stay home (and freeze due to lack of power), while all of the buildings downtown where they'd have ostensibly worked kept their lights and heat on.
Families would have unironically been better off braving the streets to park themselves in a heated office downtown rather than trying to make due in their own homes. The landlords, lawyers, insurers, and sadly the fire departments, however, would have had a meltdown trying to figure out who should be culpable for anything that ended up happening as a result of the terrible decisionmaking when building the trunk. Cutting everyone loose on their own recognizance was a brilliant stroke of legal culpability shedding there.
Gg Austin Power on that one. Friends over in Dallas were also reporting a similar situation there during the hullaballo. If it's taught me anything, it's that urban planning of power networks seriously needs some rearchitecting in those locales.
The miss here is what about PUCT who governs ERCOT. ERCOT did everything in their set of rules. We probably need to change the rules for emergencies, that’s up to the legislature and the appointees of PUCT.
I suspect the answer is far more mundane: the consumers purchased something like 98% availability, and this is what they got.