A hospital stay involving surgery.
Some households in Texas face electricity bills of $10,000
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https://www.fema.gov/faq/assistance-utility-bills
"FEMA does not pay utility bills. Local charitable organizations may be able to help for a short period. We suggest you contact your local United Way office by dialing 2-1-1 from any landline phone for a referral to a local agency that may be able to help."
We all pay. Short term thinking hurts everyone.
Lawsuits
The wind energy were all frozen.
Yes, they did not winterize but the permission was not granted to turn those fossil fuel plant by DOE anyway.
(I saw the letter of disapproval from DOE request).
So, why do they have to winterize if we are going to depend on solar without sun and wind without wind?
After all, TX never freeze and always have wind (sarc.)
The funny part was that they used helicopter which is powered by oil and fuel to spray the thawing agent to the windmill.
So, yet again, the fossil fuel to the rescue.
As for Berkeley, may be as a city, they need to install windmill on their land.
There will never be any freeze in CA.
I feel sorry for these folks. In Ontario here these resellers used to come door to door to sell you contracts for electricity. One day some lady shows up at my door with the blah blah blah. I said leave me your information and then I'll decide if I'm interested afterwards, I need to do my homework. Anyhow she says no you have to sign right now. I didn't tell her to pound sand, but I told her I wasn't interested.
Other folks over here got fleeced with rental furnaces where they are paying over $75 a month for 15 years. They cannot get out of the contract and have a 15k Lien until the 15 years is up. That practice has been outlawed.
I'm sure many of these tactics were employed when getting people to sign up.
Other folks over here got fleeced with rental furnaces where they are paying over $75 a month for 15 years. They cannot get out of the contract and have a 15k Lien until the 15 years is up. That practice has been outlawed.
I'm sure many of these tactics were employed when getting people to sign up.
My favorite subject is science and the resulting technology.
One could argue that TX decided to go it alone, do it on the cheap and ignore science (prior freeze spells like 2011). Even now, people argue, "why prepare for a rare event that may never happen". Some even blamed possible new laws that are not yet in effect.
Perserverance used everything science had to offer and successfully traveled 300M miles away to Mars and landed on the exact spot they planned on.
Anyways, that's simply comparing recent events revolving around science.
One could argue that TX decided to go it alone, do it on the cheap and ignore science (prior freeze spells like 2011). Even now, people argue, "why prepare for a rare event that may never happen". Some even blamed possible new laws that are not yet in effect.
Perserverance used everything science had to offer and successfully traveled 300M miles away to Mars and landed on the exact spot they planned on.
Anyways, that's simply comparing recent events revolving around science.
Berkeley is lost, but they are small so people can go out of it fairly easily, so the blast radius of a bad policy can easily be mitigated.
Regarding to turn on fossil fuel plant request, was it just for the days after the storm and their other plants went down? or a request to turn them on way before the season started and they have time to turn on other backup plants?
Didn't they have problem with natural gas pump went out of electricity so they cannot pump natural gas to powerplant? I am not sure if it is always fossil fuel being more reliable than renewable though.
Based on the law of large numbers, the best way to even out unusual events is to diversify over a large area with large populations. Texas should have joined the national grid. This is like insurance companies having a larger pool for more predictability, electric grid should be the same. If they don't want to join the federal grid they should have at least purchase agreement with Mexico.
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The issue is the scale of the supply deficit, they were short over 20,000MW, the transmission and excess capacity necessary to make up that deficit, even if we ignore the transmission side of it, would it have been available in neighbouring jurisdictions that were also experiencing an increase in demand?
This falsehood continues to get repeated. The request was approved and folks at various levels have noted that it was helpful during the event...
Would they be short by that much had the natural gas pump not went out of power? Or would the shortage all been happening at the same time?
I know the American grid isn't really the best in the world and we do have a large area in short supply, but being on a national grid would soften the spike and even out the worst case scenarios. Yes that means the extreme prices of up and down, and negative prices would be soften up. It would reduce the amount of blackouts for sure.
If we have enough transmission capacity we would not have a lot of the duck curve discussions either.
If Texas isn't going to pay, it looks like everyone else is. Natural gas suppliers in this area have already notified the appropriate regulatory entities that we should expect an increase of $250 to $400 for the average natural gas consumer just to cover for the spot market pricing of gas during this event. It won't be added to our bills until September, when evening up/down of the gas prices occurs to account of being under/over in the past year on gas costs (we pay the actual cost of gas, but it is averaged over a long period).
The price of a default. This will also mean some of the customers will get a bad credit score for a long time, or lien on their homes, etc. Will it trigger a default on the state or municipal? or trigger a default swap in the market? trigger a national financial melt down?
They may turn into Orange County's bankruptcy in 1994. They finally exit the bankruptcy in 2017.
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A billion class-action lawsuit was filed against Griddy over this. One outcome is that we will all learn a lot more about electricity is priced. I don't know what was communicated by Griddy regarding price but the people signed up for spot price pricing certainly didn't sign a blank check over to Griddy with no expectation that Griddy wouldn't inform them if prices went astronomical.
If the spot pricing customers are broke, they have nothing to sue for anyways. If griddy is low assets and they charge fixed price, they can just go bankrupt and dissolve, and let the generators hold the bags for it. These generators may sue the grid or the regulators, but likely not much money are there to sue for.
Whatever needs to be learn are already there in the PG&E bankruptcy due to Enron. Bad things happen and you need to design the grid and policy to avoid the worst case scenarios, or rolling blackout when things are too expensive. PG&E got a lot of hate last year when they shut down the grid in high wind to avoid wild fires. They did the right thing because it is cheaper and save lives, and they cannot afford another wild fire lawsuits. Blackout is the responsible thing to do until someone is paying for a better grid.
In the end utility customers will pay over time. Lawyers will make out like bandits.
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I'm not sure how "deep" in the grid the pump failings were. If they were far enough in that interconnect capacity wouldn't help then they would still have gone down.
And of course blackouts still happen even when you have interconnects, look at 2003 here in the north:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
And in that case it wasn't interconnects that got us back up, it was large local generators with black start capability.
They didn't HAVE to consume the electricity. 9 bucks per kWh is pretty steep, I agree, but if you're selling a commodity that has been sold on futures, the price goes up when less is sold.
These folks have an app that tells them minute by minute what their bill is, that one particular company TOLD their customers to switch to another supplier BEFORE the storm hit.
These folks have an app that tells them minute by minute what their bill is, that one particular company TOLD their customers to switch to another supplier BEFORE the storm hit.
I learned long ago to read contractual agreements carefully before signing.
The problem though, is that sometimes you don't know if the prices go up when you are not able to stop it (i.e. midnight), or when you want to switch there is a congestion you cannot switch in time.
I once had a water main burst 2 feet from the water meter, and there's about 250 CCF of water flood to the street and I didn't know until the next morning at 8am. By the next month that 250CCF turn into a $1200 extra on water bill. Due to a lawsuit municipal cannot waive the cost as they have to bill at exact cost which means they cannot "make money" to cover a loss in these scenario.
I was able to convince them to move me to a commercial account for 1 month and get a small discount on that, but that's it. It is not something you can control.
Other suppliers may not want to take you right before a storm hit. They know they will lose money during that storm and after the storm you will be gone, they don't like dead beat customers. This is like insurance companies do not like to accept customer who hasn't been insured for a long time, because they would think that you are hiding pre-existing condition.
I once had a water main burst 2 feet from the water meter, and there's about 250 CCF of water flood to the street and I didn't know until the next morning at 8am. By the next month that 250CCF turn into a $1200 extra on water bill. Due to a lawsuit municipal cannot waive the cost as they have to bill at exact cost which means they cannot "make money" to cover a loss in these scenario.
I was able to convince them to move me to a commercial account for 1 month and get a small discount on that, but that's it. It is not something you can control.
Other suppliers may not want to take you right before a storm hit. They know they will lose money during that storm and after the storm you will be gone, they don't like dead beat customers. This is like insurance companies do not like to accept customer who hasn't been insured for a long time, because they would think that you are hiding pre-existing condition.
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