We’ve learned nothing from the 2021 winter storm that killed over 200 people.
They did change one thing. You used to be able to get electricity at wholesale prices from certain providers. When the rates went crazy during the 2021 storm and people’s crazy bills for turning on the lamp blew up on the news, they shut down that option.
These rate surges do hurt customers, but now it’s in the form of rate increases when their contract expires.
Thank you for the clarification.
Rationality is out of the window. Ideology is the new religion. They don’t want to become “socialists” even though they don’t know what it truly means.
“Socialism is when capitalism.”
It’s almost scary to think of how bad it would have to get in order for voters to tick the boxes for Greens or Libertarians.
Like, how badly do these fuckers have to fail before you’re willing to shed your partisan jersey and vote to your own benefit?
Correct.
Didn’t the state basically re-elect everyone who oversaw that shit show?
Instead of requiring weatherization, they allowed power plants to opt out.
Lawmakers on the Senate Business and Commerce Committee were frustrated that the new law allows natural gas companies to opt out of weatherization requirements if they don’t voluntarily declare themselves to be “critical infrastructure” with the state.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/09/28/texas-power-grid-loophole/
It’s absolutely wild. The last time around, people died, and a lot more were put into financial hardship due to the shitty, hypercapitalist energy infrastructure. People were rightly ripshit angry about it.
And then nothing was done about any of it.
And then people keep voting for the politicians who created and perpetuated the situation.
It’s really hard to keep giving a shit about people who actively work and vote to make their own lives worse.
well we did learn that when shit hits the fan Rafael Edward Cruz likes taking vacay down south of de border way
Desire for more money overrides literally every other thought for those who have the most
they almost learned nothing. The grid almost shutdown this time, instead of shutting down…
Sure we have: profits are worth more than 200 lives, and counting.
Welcome to your deregulated “free market”, Texas. Don’t want to be tied to government regulation? Guess you get to pay more or cook…or freeze. Your choice by season.
This is Enron-scale manipulation. Someone’s ripping off the public and making a mint with the help of the regulators.
Jerry Jones, yeah same one that owns the Cowboys, made almost $1B off the price hikes durning the big freeze that almost crippled the grid.
Lol so how’s that “deregulated freedom” working out for you, Texans?
It’s not a coincidence that Texas is a hotbed of development for “microgrid” systems to cover for when ERCOT shits the bed – and of course all those systems are made up of diesel and natural gas generator farms, because Texans don’t want any of that communist solar power!
I’ve got family in Texas who love it there for some reason, but there’s almost no amount of money you could pay me to move there. Bad enough when I have to work on projects in the state – contrary to the popular narrative, in my personal opinion it’s a worse place than California to try and build something, and that’s entirely to do with the personalities that seem to gravitate to positions of power there. I’d much rather slog through the bureaucracy in Cali than tiptoe around a tinpot dictator in the planning department.
I am a power grid engineer and we are quoting multiple solar systems with BESS capabilities a month for Texas. It’s not all diesel.
I exaggerate – but Magic Rock is doing booming business installing strings of natural gas generators at Buc-ee’s across the state, and I’m currently dealing with an institutional client who wanted to provide backup power for a satellite campus, and didn’t even stop to consider battery-backed PV on the way to asking for a natural gas generator farm.
At least we’re trying to make reforms to our bureaucracy here in California, the problems mostly originate on the county and city levels. As for why the state is/was rather decentralized relatively speaking, well its cause we roughly the size of Great Britain (the island not the empire) and half the state is mountainous to some degree.
I live in Texas and have already received 2 notices this spring to conserve electricity. It has barely hit 90, and they aren’t able to keep up with demand. They get the same weather reports we have access to, up to 14-21 days, yet they can’t/won’t anticipate demand?
It’s almost like they have a financial incentive to pull this shit.
In 2000/2001 this same shit was being done in California, leading to rolling blackouts and record-high energy prices. One company was buying all the plants and shutting them down for “maintenance” specifically to increase energy prices.
There were going to be congressional hearings over it in early 2022, but that company was Enron, and at the end of 2001 they collapsed due to other bullshit they were pulling.
|early 2022
Bit late, if you ask me.
Whoopsie ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
worse in CA was PG&e causing devastating forest fires because they refused to shut of the power and had insufficient line maintenance
Fun fact, in case you weren’t aware; Texas pays bitcoin mining companies to shut off their rigs during peak demand.
Miners love this; in effect they can just threaten to mine bitcoin and get paid as much as they would have made actually mining bitcoin, but without the wear and tear on their expensive hardware. It’s a legalized extortion racket being enacted on the public purse.
Apologies if I just gave you even more reason to be angry.
didn’t mining costs just double? gl with that
Effectively, yes. But that just makes extorting the government even more effective in comparison. Better to just get paid not to mine.
Bookmarking this for the next time white supremacists here in good ole’ South Africa peddles the “privatisation is the only thing that will fix our electricity problems!” bullcrap.
Thanks, Texas!
No no no, that’s not true privatization. True privatization would fix all the problems
Privatisation can only work if the end consumers have genuine choice.
In the UK electricity is privatised and I can pick from dozens of companies. This honestly works pretty well, and you can pick the cheapest depending on when you use electricity and how much. It’s the same infrastructure no matter who you pick, but that seems handled fairly well. Same with internet providers.
We also privatised water, and we just get given a company to rule over each area of the country. Unsurprisingly, given the consumer has no recourse other than “have no water” this is an absolute fucking shit-show. They’ve not invested in enough reservoirs, nor sewage handling, and instead lobby the government to make it legal to just put it in the rivers instead. It’s the same story with trains.
Satire on point.
Pretty sure they are happy they don’t have “communism” when they pay those bills.
Imagine all those Californians that moved to Texas.
Seriously they deserve what they get for not appreciating what they had.
Funny, I was thinking the same of the New Yorkers who moved to Texas. I live in New York (not the City) and yah the state has problems, but you couldn’t pay me to move to a Southern state…
IDK, coming from NYC to TX is probably a net upgrade in a lot of ways, especially if you’re a small business owner or work for one. The laws in NYC are just so bonkers.
Then again, I’m uninterested in moving to TX either. I’m pretty happy here in Utah, and I may move back home to Seattle, WA at some point, or maybe we’ll move to NC. But I’m not moving anywhere further south than NC.
Yah the taxes in NYS (not NYC) are one of the problems I mentioned, but on the other hand I’ve seen what they paid for. As an Upstate NY resident I have a love/hate relationship with NYC. On one hand it causes a lot of funky laws to be passed at the state level. On the other hand it brings in a FUCK TON of tax revenue that Upstate benefits from
Honestly Louis Rossmans experience as a small business owner living the real life Kafka novel in new Yorks legal system made me never want to live there.
True.
Some, but there are a lot of people here who recognize the hypocrisy and trash policies put into place in the state by politicians who do not wish to govern, only consolidate power.
Do this lot of people vote?
They do, but Texas is one of the most difficult states to register to vote. Voter suppression is real and by design.
This explains it well: Texas’s Voter-Registration Laws Are Straight Out of the Jim Crow Playbook
and Analysis: It’s harder to vote in Texas than in any other state
I will never get why you have to Register at all
There are actual checks and balance to ensure you’re a citizen and you vote at most once
Where I live you just get a letter some weeks before the election. With that letter you can vote at the place that is named in the letter (or anywhere in the same city). If you lose the letter you can still vote with your id-card, but only at the place that was named in the letter.
Easy, isn’t it?
It make sense if it were like the TSA to be honest, bring everything you need to vote or preregister for a faster experience. Would also help if was voting month(s) instead of day so people could comfortably vote.
That‘s one of the consequences of not having citizen IDs, because they’re communist.
That’s really dumb. Here in Utah, you sign up online, and you can get a mail ballot online too. I have never actually voted in person, I just fill out my ballot and drop it in one of the collection bins a few days before the election. We can even track our ballot to ensure it gets processed.
Why overcomplicate it? I don’t need to take time off to vote, and I can take my time researching the candidates. Voting should be easy.
Texas is really good at gerrymandeirng
I wish it was possible to vote strongly enough for gerrymandering to be irrelevant.
Another 51% win for Biden will certainly trigger another violent inssurection attempt and another 4 years of inaction.
The best outcome would be a landslide victory if only to show the republican voters that their ideas are not supported by the general public.
51% win for Biden seems insanely optimistic right now.
it would take so little for Biden to rake in the votes but the Democrats in general seem to be doing everything they can to embarrass themselves even worse than 2016 …
That’s a cop out. There are plenty of terrible people in that state.
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I bet those businesses who relocated from Cali to Texas are loving those power prices.
Oh yeah, they already left Texas.
Besides that one time power goes out more often in California. In Texas you just have a temporary price surge you could treat like a blackout if you wanted to. The difference is it’s less often and you have a choice.
I haven’t had a power outage in about ten years, between SDG&E, PG&E, and SoCal Edison. Meanwhile, Texas has regular power outages. So just what are you on about?
Texans being Texans
Like the time people were freezing to death during a power outage while the governor took a vacation to Cancún?
Exactly, they were too poor to heat their homes and that was their choice.
The biggest mistake a lot of people make is being born poor.
*Senator
Yeah, if you want a governor abandoning his people, look to Kevin Stitt (Oklahoma) last year when Tulsa was without power for about a week. Lieutenant Governor was out too, literally no one had any idea who was in charge of the state.
Maybe power is more reliable in central Texas, my family still has no electricity from the derecho that hit Houston. And they lose power frequently from all the heavy storms or hurricanes that pummel the gulf coast.
Texas under Republicans is a disaster as an ongoing concern
Oh, Texas. Your power grid is an endless source of amusement (for people who don’t have to rely on it, of course).
Losing power for three days, but knowing my energy bill will be twice as high as last months is always a cool feeling.
Smartass remarks aside, you have my sympathies.
I mean, I work in the O&G industry. Y’all have every right to be as smartass as you please.
so what’s the reason they’re the only state independent from the national grid?
they just know better?
guess that’s why they call it the lone star stateso what’s the reason they’re the only state independent from the national grid?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection
There’s a whole article on it in Wikipedia, but the TL;DR; boils down to “If we’re not connected nationally then we don’t have to abide by national regulations”.
That’s ostensibly a cost-saving, assuming you don’t think too hard about what’s being regulated. But its also a great opportunity to price gouge consumers.
sounds about right
We’re free to do all the great, innovative things we could want! But mostly the sneakiest, underhanded, previously illegal shit we want…
Everything’s bigger in Texas.
Especially the incompetence.
The reason Texans hate government so much is because they have no idea what it looks like when it’s run correctly.
What year in a row ia this?
I don’t know but it started making international news during the pandemic, so at least 5th.
Greed and incompetience. No wonder Texas has been resistant to federal regulation and interconnect its power network with the rest of the country.
Everything’s bigger in Texas, even the power bill.
Everything is bigger in Texas
* Except the paycheck
So I assume that ted cruz flees to ski somewhere this time? And does he still blame his daughters, or does that change as well?
Maybe he’s not fleeing the states crumbling infrastructure, maybe he’s taking his wife and/or daughter(s) for out of state abortions.
Better Sue him to be on the safe side.
Buttma taxes
