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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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.

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In the past 30 days, 33% of generation in ERCOT was wind or solar (mostly wind). For comparison, CAISO in California was 23% (mostly solar).

You’d want to look over a longer period of time since those figures have big seasonal variations, and we can’t forget that California has a considerably larger economy and population – there are around a hundred countries with populations smaller than the difference between California and Texas - so it would probably be better to make that comparison per-capita or per-gigawatt. Since we’re talking about renewables, greenhouse emissions would also be a good point and it looks like California’s grid is substantially cleaner than Texas’ by that metric according to the EPA, but that’s complicated by California having the option to buy power from outside the state.

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”.

OK, last 365 days, 31% for Texas, 29% for Cali.

You can play here https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...

That would mean that California is producing more renewable power since its grid is considerably larger, and again my point was simply that Texas is not doing enough better to justify their failures. If they were much higher, maybe we could debate something like the number of lives saved from not polluting versus the unreliability, but the state still has huge pollution issues and isn’t far ahead of the competition. As it is, it looks like the primary beneficiaries are the finance guys getting a chunk of those wild surge prices.

Are you under the impression that the utility business is wildly profitable? I’d like to disabuse you of that notion. Not everything is a reinforcement of your priors.

It’s a guaranteed profit on a very large amount, which isn’t anything to sneeze at, but if you read my comment note that I specifically referred to the financialization. The way the market is structured means that suppliers see very large upsides during high demand. Going back to that 2021 crisis:

> 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.

I don’t think most parts of the chain enjoy the volatility. Perhaps the generators who could capture the spikes but it seems that for most parts of the chain, stability in prices would drive more consistent margins. Spikes in prices would suggest market inefficiency and drive more generation.

> 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.

You can’t name the two biggest states and then ask for ten bigger ones.

If you want per capita renewables, Iowa and Kansas beat both Texas and California.

How about rate of increase in percentage of total installed capacity? That's the real measure of how fast the grid is changing.

Still Iowa?

> 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...

Yes, so one state. The next 9?

If it's common there should be dozens of examples. There's 50 states, there should be plenty of examples.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_electri...

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.

Most of those have had a high renewable mix since electricity was a new thing due to natural hydro available. Hence my original question being scoped to the last 20 years. You still haven't answered it, and there were no goalposts moved.

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.

That punishes early adopters who did a slow and gradual rollout instead of a panicked one.

The claim was that states moving from a small percentage togenerating 30% of their total energy from renewables in a couple of decades is a common thing. I'm asking for other examples. There should be many if it's common.

>The rates I see right now are higher than what my local utility charges, about on par with our all-renewable option,

Thought renewables were cheaper than fossil fuels?

It depends on where you live and what timeframe you’re comparing - the renewable capacity varies more so you need more overcapacity, which means that when conditions are good the price is really low. I think there’s going to a big boom figuring out how to adjust business practices to optimize use of over-production when that happens.

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