Texas Gas Companies Hit Texas Consumers With 'Whoops You Froze To Death' Surcharge
from the frozen-to-death-surcharge dept
If you hadn't noticed, the United States isn't really prepared for climate change. In part because corporations and disinformation mills have convinced countless Americans a destabilizing climate isn't actually happening. But also because we were already perpetually underinvesting in our core infrastructure before the symptoms of an unstable climate began to manifest. It's a massive problem that, as John Oliver highlighted six years ago, doesn't get the same attention as other pressing issues of the day. You know, like the latest influencer drama or the mortal threat posed by TikTok.
Infrastructure policy is treated as annoying and boring... until a crisis hits and suddenly everybody cares. As millions of Texans found out earlier this year when the state's energy infrastructure crumbled like a rotten old house under the weight of heating energy demands, leaving millions without power during a major cold snap. While the state engaged in a lot of performative nonsense in the wake of the breakdown, nothing much changed. Most of the state laws passed to "fix" the problem just punted any meaningful action down the road, while carving out big exemptions for natural gas companies that helped write the laws.
Fast forward nine months and the natural gas companies that refused to upgrade and weather proof their infrastructure, still largely haven't done so. What have they done? Well, recently they decided to hit Texas natural gas customers with a major and obnoxious new $3.4 billion surcharge with the blessing of state regulators:
"Texans will be paying for the effects of last February’s cold snap for decades to come, as the state’s oil and gas regulator approved a plan for natural gas utilities to recover $3.4 billion in debt they incurred during the storm. The regulator, the Railroad Commission, is allowing utilities to issue bonds to cover the debt. As a result, ratepayers could see an increase in their bills for the next 30 years.
So not only did Texas regulators not hold local energy utilities and frackers accountable for not weather proofing their infrastructure after decades of warnings, they're happily signing off on a plan to let them punish consumers for their own incompetence. The dysfunction runs parallel with similar dysfunction in the telecom sector, where companies routinely fail to adequately invest in their networks, yet still somehow punish their captive customers and taxpayers with the blessing of local regulators who rarely hold them accountable for anything. The big difference of course: a broadband outage (usually) won't kill you.
Granted the dysfunction in Texas doesn't just impact Texans. The regulatory corruption and incompetence has a ripple effect on things like natural gas prices, which impacts users in other states as well, as Katie Sieben, chairwoman of the Minnesota Public Utility Commission, told The Washington Post back in April:
"The ineptness and disregard for common-sense utility regulation in Texas makes my blood boil and keeps me up at night,” Katie Sieben, chairwoman of the Minnesota Public Utility Commission, said in an interview. “It is maddening and outrageous and completely inexcusable that Texas’s lack of sound utility regulation is having this impact on the rest of the country."
This kind of infrastructure corruption and dysfunction is nothing new (again, just look at US telecom, rail travel, or countless other sectors). But climate change is one arena where state/federal corruption and our propaganda problem has congealed into something particularly nasty. It's not clear how many mass-fatality events we have to live through before we embrace meaningful corruption, lobbying, and regulatory reform, but it's apparently going to be a significant number, as America remains utterly allergic to learning anything from history or experience.
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Filed Under: climate change, energy prices, surchargers, texas
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Speaking of broadband outages, here's the funny thing: during the massive outages here in Texas, for those brief periods when the power came back, the internet was available immediately, and wireless provider uptime was also 100%.
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Re: Down in a microsecond
Texas won't enforce the federally mandated battery back-up on the Tellcos
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Fortunately, that only applies to POTS (i.e. copper telephone lines)
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Well at least that charge was due to an actual emergency, prepared for or not.
Ratepayers everywhere are responsible for the decisions of power companies-that’s the way it works.
Like in California, for instance, where the state has caused a significant increase in rates because energy companies are forced to generate expensive renewable energy. We ratepayers pay (a lot) for that decision, even though it wasn’t even an emergency.
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The rates for solar and wind, you have been paying for along time, if you hadnt noticed.
And the difference is based on the Other corps that bring in power. The Solar/wind is a % above the regular cost from the corps.
Look up generating facilities in California. Then look up what you are getting from outside sources. I will bet that california gets abit more then 1/2 their power from outside. And How Enron was able to over charge you for years.(before they got caught doing it).
There is no easy way to install a New power generation facility in california. Want another nuke plant on a fault line? You will need 2 more, and they NEED water. How about a coal plant?
Those are the choices Unless you can find a better one.
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"There is no easy way to install a New power generation facility in california."
The real trick isn't power generation. It's transmission and most of all, storage which pose the major challenges.
Wind and sun can provide the power no problem - but unpredictably. With no way to store the surplus they can't match the utility of a plant where all you need to do is turn a dial to increase or reduce energy generation. Solar in California will provide best utility on local levels, where individual households can save the grid some strain by installing a roof full of collectors and a big enough battery to cover most of the household needs.
But then you hit the logistics of batteries with the required capacity requiring lithium and the extraction of that element is...not environmentally friendly.
With the timelines we currently face it'll boil down to nuclear in the end, for every country save Iceland and similar places sitting on nigh-infinite geothermal power.
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Well, considering California's problem with fresh water they could always use the excess to run a desalination plant. As I understand it, today they either store excess energy in big flywheels or if that's not feasible they "burn" it off by heating water. It's possible they have other means of handling excess generation, but it's nothing I'm familiar with.
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Another option is pumped storage hydroelectricity.
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Forgot that one, but it's a bit problematic when the state has a water-shortage.
AFAIK they only have 4 pumped storage facilities with a combined capacity of ~2.8-2.9 GW at ideal conditions.
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Is there any particular reason they couldn't use pumped storage with seawater? California has a lot of coastline, surely some of it isn't particularly valuable.
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No particular reason I guess, but remember that you need quite a bit of storage and/or height difference for it to be effective and there aren't that much actual free space at the coast that's suitable for a dam.
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"Is there any particular reason they couldn't use pumped storage with seawater?"
There is. Seawater is corrosive, meaning the facilities will be far more expensive to build and maintain...and the cost of a leak at any point in the pipe going down is going to be an ecological disaster because inland vegetation isn't fond of brine.
Secondly the amount you can store with seawater is limited by the height at which you can store it. Meaning you need to first find an area significantly higher than ocean level, then hollow out a container the size of a lake in it unless you're lucky enough to find a suitable mountain valley to sacrifice by just damming the runoff point. It's not a minor engineering feat.
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"Another option is pumped storage hydroelectricity."
With the current issues of keeping Hoover dam at sufficient level and the general - and worsening - shortage of water on the west coast that's not much of an option.
Seawater has been suggested as the medium of choice but the issue there is that salt water is corrosive and poses a lot more expense - and risk, when the storage solution involves pumping a lake's worth of water to a mountaintop with surplus power and tap it for hydro in times of need.
It's a sign of the desperation that thought up ways to store surplus power for days and months of scarcity by now include innovatively sculpting vast areas of landscape. Like turning big parts of coastline into iron-seawater batteries or building vast jenga towers of house-sized concrete blocks using cranes to store kinetic energy. So far there just isn't anything which scales well for the amounts of energy storage required.
And thus plants - fossil fuel-driven or nuclear - need to pick up the slack, putting a hard limit on the proportion of clean energy we can use at scale.
And that limit is enforced by every person, no matter how eco-aware, who realizes the cost of switching to clean energy quickly will spike their energy and gas bill.
The US can't even tolerate the price of gas going up a few cents, so we shouldn't expect any headway in switching to green energy to come from that place. Not until after everyone else has paid the price of developing functional infrastructure around it, and probably not then either.
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Pump storage can recirculate water between two lakes, or to help solar generation, take water from a river during the day, and return it overnight. A pumped storage system does not need the vast water storage of the likes of the Hoover dam, as it not expected to run continuously for months on the water in the storage lake, only hours or maybe a few days. Also, pumped storage does not rely on rain or snow pack providing the inflow to the upper storage, as it pumps water uphill when there is power to spare.
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"A pumped storage system does not need the vast water storage of the likes of the Hoover dam, as it not expected to run continuously for months on the water in the storage lake"
Correct as written, but for the storage to perform it still requires all the relevant criteria - a long distance between high and low point, sufficient water, and sufficient pump capacity to react appropriately to grid fluctuations. And that's still a tall order because it requires a lot of suitable terrain, a lot of water, and, if the idea is to cover for the unpredictable fluctuations in wind and sun power, an unholy fuckload of high-capacity pumps.
What all potential storage solutions will cost is money. Money that will not ever come from the private sector - because unless the government directly outlaws coal there will never be a point where green energy trumps coal in cheapness in the quarterly profits.
And honestly, the US does not have a great record when it comes to public works, particularly not California.
Relying on sun and wind requires the extra steps of heavily modifying the grid and inventing, building and maintaining expensive and extremely cumbersome storage solutions (which may not even be possible at the location). All of which significantly adds to the bill then passed on to the customer.
Or they build a few new nuclear power plants to replace the coal plants and call it a day.
At the end of this I'm hoping for nuclear plants to be the winner because it can replace the 90% of the US energy consumption still made of fossil fuels quickly - possibly even in time for it to matter.
The reality is that although everyone would more likely want sun power to be the winner, we are out of time. We were out of time years back. We need to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 0 as soon as we can, irrespective of what it costs, because if we hit a single tipping point we're done. It's no longer a race to ward of the apocalypse. It's a race to mitigate it as far as possible, as fast as possible.
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There are several issues with nuclear plants. They need a reliable supply of water, which can be sea water. They should also avoid earthquake zones, which rules out much of the US west coast. While they handle constant load easily, they do not handle varying loads, and so need to be coupled with another generator type.
Nuclear power cannot be used as a complete replacement for fossil fuel plants, and for nuclear to provide more than base load, some way of absorbing excess power is required, such as pumped storage. Hydro power is also required to deal with load above the base load.
The grid modifications are not that extreme, as solar and wind is a distributed generation, and can feed back to the backbone grid via the existing distribution system, while feeding power to local users. Power lines and transformers do not care which way the power is flowing. While storage needs to be attached to the grid, it is not necessary for it to be near the generators. Wind generators on the coast and pumped storage in the mountains is viable, and is also a distributed system. Distributed systems can be more resilient than more centralized systems. A nuclear power station on the other hand is a concentrated generator and needs high power connection to the backbone of the grid.
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"There are several issues with nuclear plants."
That's putting it mildly. If only the focus of research had been on liquid salt thorium reactors rather than barely subcritial reaction uranium reactors producing weapons-grade fissiles as rest product we'd all be in better shape.
However, issues or not; we don't have the time. We either replace - fully - our fossil fuels with sources not generating greenhouse gas, or we hand to the next generation a smoldering wasteland.
"The grid modifications are not that extreme, as solar and wind is a distributed generation, and can feed back to the backbone grid via the existing distribution system, while feeding power to local users."
Then why is that one of the major issues facing nations like Germany and Sweden? Even nations with up-do-date power grids need to rebuild theirs to accommodate the shift to drawing generated power from thousands of places which so far only planned for the power draw of a few isolated households. Because the thing about wind and solar power is that you put it in isolated places no one wanted to build housing in. Hence there is no coverage, and hence you need to expand the grid to the point where you might as well rebuild it.
Which you'll have to do anyway given that none of it is built to handle the load of every car turning EV.
"Wind generators on the coast and pumped storage in the mountains is viable..."
If we had fifty years or more to build it which we don't. There's a logistical issue with coring out a mountain for an artificial lake, there's even more of a logistical issue trying to find the water to pump into that lake these days, and there's an issue with drawing the pipe.
If this project wasn't planned in the nation of "No, we can't" I'd say it might be feasible...but we are talking about a nation which can not maintain its existing infrastructure, can't manage any public project properly, and has tried to build high-speed rail for over a decade as a result of which the state of California has burned money like there was no tomorrow and barely managed to draw a line between Bakersfield and Merced.
I don't credit the US to, within the timeframe (too late), to build storage pumps, solar panels, and wind farms to cover the 80% of its energy production still relying on fossil fuels. No matter that would be the preferred option.
But those ships have all sailed. We don't have the time. The best options all take time which doesn't exist.
"A nuclear power station on the other hand is a concentrated generator and needs high power connection to the backbone of the grid."
Which already exists since all you need to do is build the nuclear plant where the current coal or gas plant stands and plug it into the same trunk. The wind or sun farm, otoh, is going to be placed where there's a lot of surface with no habitation and thus no grid coverage to begin with.
Nuclear plants aren't desirable by any means but they are comparatively plug and play.
As we've seen in Europe where we've focused far more on green power than the US has, there is only one nation which managed to switch and keep it's energy production into more than 90% non-fossil. And only did so by having some 70%+ be nuclear.
Germany, meanwhile, in the throes of the Green Wave for decades, has tried frantically and is still over 50% reliant on fossils. And only at that point because 12% is still nuclear power.
We can ivory tower this around as much as we like but the facts are in; humanity has proven incapable of replacing a major proportion of its energy needs with sustainables. And blame voters for that, who all pay good lip service to the concept of renewables but the very second they discover it means a higher power bill or paying more in taxes to build the damn replacement to coal they cast their vote on the candidate in the pocket of the coal and oil barons.
Yeah, in theory we could do all you claim. In vivo the best we can hope for is to swiftly persuade the body politic to put down a few plug-and-play nuclear plants to replace the coal and gas burners.
We don't have the time any longer to hammer out the details, find the proper engineering, plan and build grand works of energy storage all over a nation the size of a continent and plaster the damn thing with photovoltaics, sun towers and wind generators.
Greenland's glaciers are done for no matter what we do now, so the tipping point of Earth's albedo losing several percent is a given. The siberian permafrost is melting and so we're at the second tipping point when the stored methane is released én másse.
It's too late to fix any of this. It's too late to mitigate it to tolerable levels. We either shut the exhaust tap on emission right now, right here...or a hundred years from now humanity will be in the middle of an extinction event of its own making.
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You can't build nuclear any faster either, if anything the build will be slower.
Only if there is enough free space on, or by the site to build the new plant, and the site has an adequate water supply for a nuclear plant. It may surprise you, but a nuclear plant needs a larger water supply that coal or gas to meet the emergency cooling needs, where a significant of power has to be absorbed for may hours.
There is also a requirement for fast throttling generators, to deal with load fluctuations in the seconds to minutes range. Coal fired, and combined cycle gas fired turbines work here, because steam can be throttled for quick reaction, and fuel throttled to meat the average load on the minutes time scale. Solar panel and wind are also quick reacting, solar panels because you control how much power you take, and wind by controlling the blade pitch.
There is also the spinning reserve problem, that is having the capacity to take over from your biggest plant ready to take over its load in seconds. Hydro is an option for that, where the water flow is needed for river management, and it can be switched between bypass, and going through the turbines by a diverter.
A few big plants make sense where fuel efficiency is a concern, however renewable resources can be more physically distributed, which also makes the grid more resilient. For instance 5 pump generators in one place, versus 5 plants in different places. The latter requires more, but smaller lakes, and you lose less capacity if for any reason a lake needs to be drained.
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"You can't build nuclear any faster either, if anything the build will be slower. "
You certainly can. You only need one set of permissions - whereas in California I dare you to try to replace currently existing fuel plants with acreages of sun and wind farms. Unlike with sun and wind you also don't need to rewire parts of the grid if all you do is replace one type of plant with another.
"It may surprise you, but a nuclear plant needs a larger water supply that coal or gas to meet the emergency cooling needs, where a significant of power has to be absorbed for may hours."
It really doesn't surprise me, no. I'm writing this with at least basic knowledge of what I'm talking about. I'm assuming that you mean to say that a lot of fossil fuel plants aren't located conveniently near sources of water and thus not able to be replaced quite that easily? Yes, you're right. Water supply remains a problem, and won't be easily fixed.
"There is also a requirement for fast throttling generators..."
Not sure where you're going with this. any turbine-based generator can release or engage power efficiency quickly just by moving the coils generating the inducted electricity back from the rotating spindle.
"Solar panel and wind are also quick reacting, solar panels because you control how much power you take, and wind by controlling the blade pitch."
Within a narrow range, yes. Sudden cloud coverage or precipitation can cause drastic shifts in solar production. The blade pitch of a wind turbine won't help much to offset sudden squalls and slipstreams.
"A few big plants make sense where fuel efficiency is a concern..."
This is an issue of scale. France has managed to be 90% free of greenhouse gas emissions in power generation. But only because they focused on nuclear. Germany is at less than 50% of that. And that still includes 12% nuclear.
The US has 80% of its power generated by fossil fuels. To replace that as quickly as it will need to be replaced sun and wind are suckers bets.
Politically speaking far more motivated nations in the world than the US have tried to replace fossils with sustainables. The only successes we can point to is those who've used nuclear energy instead. To get from where you are today to where you need to be 2050...looking at having sun and water take over those 80% of power generation isn't even optimistic anymore. It's demanding a genuine miracle.
It's not that your points aren't all correct. They are.
It's that they're completely irrelevant unless they can all be implemented in a very brief period of time. And cheat sheet in hand we can look at the world and state, with authority backed by history, that unless the US manages to install leadership more devoted to sustainable energy than European Green Party fanatics and keep them in power...then you won't even see 10% more of power generation converted into sustainables.
Honestly, for myself I'd want a sensible mix of thorium liquid salt reactors, wind and sun power for our needs. Gradually brought in it would be an enormous boon to everyone. But it's not going to happen because we've squandered the time we need to invest and build it and no nation, least of all the US, will wreck itself to safe the prosperity of the next few generations. Not if it impacts the quarterly margins or the fiscal year today.
Replacing fossil fuel plants with nuclear ones may not work either. It just has a far better shot at succeeding.
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[addendum to this;]
"Solar panel and wind are also quick reacting, solar panels because you control how much power you take, and wind by controlling the blade pitch."
Sadly not enough. Germany and Sweden have both found that trying to increase the proportion of wind a measly 10% resulted in Sweden's case emergency measures to rise from 15 to 240 cases every year - brownouts, burnouts, blackouts. In Germany's case they had to pull the emergency plug on factories, at the risk of breaking billions of € worth in hardware.
To get wind to pose a significant part of energy production you literally need to retool most of the grid, putting significant storage facilities in every wind farm. And that's not counting the ecosystem cost of having those plants landbound where the sound and rotors have so far wiped out the populations of birds and bats in any place they're built.
Wind power was a nice idea. But at scale it just isn't sustainable to cover more than a fraction of society's needs.
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Reference for that?
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"Reference for that?"
>"The Energy Footprint: How Oil, Natural Gas, and Wind Energy Affect Land for Biodiversity and the Flow of Ecosystem Services"
Finally some anecdotal indicators out of Germany and Sweden where it's been noted that the turbine noise drives away birds and mammals as effectively as a major influx of predators.
The problem is that in urban areas man-created hazards and pets are far more harmful to the bird population but wind farms are quite often located in places where they deny a lot of territory to existing avians and mammals.
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OK, this is the closest I can find to any mention of bird or bat populations being "wiped out" by wind turbines:
"Habitat loss is the leading cause of species extinction... wind and oil and gas are comparable per unit area but that wind energy would require almost twice the footprint of oil and gas per unit energy produced"
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On Monday morning everyone pulls the score out of their nose
Let's see... No, let's pontificate and assume impossibilities.
Air-iron, nickel-iron, nickel–hydrogen, lead-acid, nickel–metal hydride, grid storage with used E-car batteries are now being built by the megawatt. Potassium-ion or sodium-ion, compressed air storage, de-combined and re-combined NH3, molten salt storage and others are all in prototype stage. Five ton motor-generators were in sub-stations to smooth the load in 1923.
Static grid interface with garaged electric cars was studied by California in the early 1990's, and concluded that the State would never need to build any more fixed generation.. assuming GM's EV-1 would go into mass production. Fooled everybody with their brown suppository, didn't they?
The product of boiling water with uranium is plutonium, paid for by utility rate-payers. The children's children can eat the radionuclides. "Truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies" -Winston Churchill
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You're laughably wrong about the "significant increate in rates" due to "expensive renewable energy." But even if you were correct, that money would be going to future-proofing the grid, rather than paying for the next 3 decades for the screw-ups that happened in 2000 like in Texas. SOMETHING has to replace the hydro power that you're going to lose as fresh water becomes scarce. What, exactly, do you suggest? Non-renewables don't last forever. And you might suggest nuclear, which would create a vastly larger power bill for you over the next 10-15 years, but where do you store the waste?
Meanwhile, there will absolutely be more years like 2000, where Texans lose power and die because they couldn't be bothered with regulation and basic planning for the future.
This will happen because of people like you, who are more concerned with parroting dumb political talking points you've been fed than with intelligent planning and learning about real solutions to real problems.
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Re: Texas Wind Generators were producing E at specification
Texas’s lack of sound utility regulation is having this impact on the rest of the country Does she mean We' all can't learn nothing from a bad example? Texas is isolated from FERC and the National grid (something about freedumb) except Amarillo's Pantex where the US is storing 20,000 pits. The Pinkcoes at MSN say https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/stumbling-plutonium-pit-project-reveals-doe-s-uphill-climb-of-nucl ear-modernization/ar-AAOuaK5 Disclaimer: I lived off the grid for years in the late 1980's, many good answers need to happen.. NOW
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Re: In Early 2019
Enbridge’s Valley Crossing Pipeline—a 168-mile line running from Agua Dulce, Texas, to the Gulf of Mexico east of Brownsville—entered service, with the capacity to move up to 2.6 billion cubic feet a day (Bcf/d) of natural gas south of the border ...or HALF of the Permian Basin in lower Texas traded for drugs & E-F150's to Mexico. On a different note, Obama had 1 LNG export port, we now have a dozen. See, tar-sands from Alberta cross America with heated, high pressure pipelines to Louisiana, that shit gets "refined", reduced to jet fuel & fresh black merde smeared every five years (evaporating VOC's) on our roads and highways, or piled along the Detroit river:(
The US East Coast lost it's biggest refinery to an "accident" in June of 2019. Convenient.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change
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Trump fans really pick the strangest hills to die on. Like the one on January 6th.
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First Projecting Falsitas, now California - what subject will LittleCupcakes spout right-wing false narratives on next?
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I'm still on the fence here. Just because LittleCupcakes keeps building the argument around alt-right talking points doesn't mean we're talking about a Koby, Baghdad Bob or Shel10.
Unfortunately there are plenty of progressive liberals who have heard the alt-right talking points so often by now they've started thinking they're partially real. That, I surmise, is logical enough when it comes to PV for anyone who hasn't actually read up on PV and O'Keefe in particular.
And when it comes to this bit about California it's an unfortunate fact that US progressives as a whole love to educate themselves about an issue, will pay a lot of lip service and keyboard warrioring around it...and then, when they find out that desperate measures are expensive they instantly back off.
Housing shortage in liberal areas? Sure, housing scarcity is horrible and robs everyone not born of privilege of proper access to work and education.
But god forbid high-density housing is built where it could conceivably impact the prices of their dreamy one-household villas.
Global warming? Horrible. Awful. We Must Do Something.
Unless it means gas and electricity prices go up in which case go on and bring the coal.
Racial equality and education? A Given. Must Be Done. All Are Born Equal.
Unless it means letting their kids learn about the inconvenient reality of slavery and the genocide of the native american tribes in which case toss those books right on that big bonfire and bring the happy bedtime story about the slave and the injun being happy about knowing their place.
The US as a whole is too driven by avarice to put together a functional public health system or even manage to get accurate history taught in schools...but they're supposed to somehow manage to scrap fossil fuels because the next generation will be facing a god damn extinction event?
I don't see that happening. Even China has more political will to change - perhaps because they're used to planning for generations ahead and don't like the idea of massive famine coming back as a trend in the middle kingdom.
No, the world will have to try to face global warming in spite of the US crying, screaming, and clinging to its ways like a recalcitrant child every step of the way.
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Progressives are saying this? Where?
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"Progressives are saying this? Where?"
Correction. People who claim they are.
You know the ones. The average John/Jane Q Doe. Upper middle class, lives in a nice house they're up over both ears in mortgage on, send their kids to a nice school, think their savings are enough to push one of them through college. The ones who are all in on equality and affordable housing - but solidly vote against allowing the city to open zones anywhere nearby to high-density development. The ones all in favor of public health care, equal-opportunity education, sustainable energy, and recycling initiatives. Until it turns out to be expensive, inconvenient, and Dear God, 3$ the gallon on gas!? at which point they'll - reluctantly - vote for the other candidate.
And who are all in for equality in race and gender but when their young kids are taught the realities of what slavery was like in school and they find LGTB-friendly literature in the school library they eagerly help the local republicans to keep that sort of stuff hidden until the kid turns 18 or so. Because kids at the age of 10 and early teens shouldn't learn about the real world.
There's a reason Biden can win big in a number of states where the democrats are currently being clobbered. Part of it is the message, but a lot has to do with the fairly large amount of people eager to see change made - somewhere else, far away. Because on the local level that change will, more often than not, be expensive, expose your small child to hard truths about the world, or cause your house values not to rise quite as steeply.
There are a lot of these. They go to the polls for president and vote democrat...and that's their act of conscience for those four years.
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Re:
"We ratepayers pay (a lot) for that decision, even though it wasn’t even an emergency."
Environmental care in energy generation actually became an emergency some twenty years ago. Worldwide, however, no government or state agency has ever placed switching the energy generation paradigm on the front burner and so these last few years started a frantic game of playing catch-up. Which, needless to say, is way more expensive than a gradual effort would have been.
"...energy companies are forced to generate expensive renewable energy."
Worse, really. For the most part currently they are forced to generate the illusion of renewable energy. Again a worldwide problem - because the infrastructure (storage capacity, grid expansion, coverage) doesn't exist. Your rate increases, same as most in the world, will be covering a rush job of scattered efforts not meeting the stated goals.
I'd say if we had actually started working hard, accepting minor constraints and expenses, twenty years ago or so, we would today already have a proportion of renewable energy significant enough to stave off the worst effects of global warming within this century.
Since we haven't, there are few options left. In most cases the most plausible options left will either be a lot of new nuclear plants, drop the focus on sustainability altogether, or push massive amounts of government money into emergency infrastructure expansion.
Either option has costs and consequences. We're paying for ten pounds of cure instead of for an ounce of prevention...
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Re: Re:
Renewable power generation costs are dropping (fast on a historical scale for technology changes). We are close to the point where the cost of generating energy is lower if you build a new photovoltaic solar plant than if you just keep running an existing coal plant. Of course, generating cost for energy aren't the real story, that's providing energy to the consumer when required. For that we'll need energy storage at a volume and cost equivalent to the energy generation.
If we could get the storage cost of a joule of energy to the same level as the cost of generating said joule, withing the decade all fossil fuel power generation will likely be uneconomical most places around the world.
We are close to the point that the best thing politicians can do to solve the carbon crisis is simply get out of the way. On that subject, the biggest single thing the pols can do to address the crisis is also good economics without any economic cost to the government - stop subsidizing fossil fuel use (whether at production, transportation or consumption).
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Re: Re: Re:
"Of course, generating cost for energy aren't the real story, that's providing energy to the consumer when required."
This being the real issue at hand. Actual generation only really skews the cost-efficiency ratio a bit further to the direction it's already leaning into. Eventually the solar plant, no matter how inefficient, beats out the running costs of coal.
The real monsters at hand are storage and transmission. Every grid today is built around the access to existing plants and planned around the major load just being along the trunk. To cater to wind and solar farms at scale, not to mention providing every existing gas station along every highway with the capacity for dozens of EV charging stations rather than just what's required to run a large freezer, a few stovetops and lighting...every nation will need to replace the bigger part of their power grid.
"We are close to the point that the best thing politicians can do to solve the carbon crisis is simply get out of the way."
That is lamentably naíve - even in Europe where the citizenry normally realizes that fixing old issues costs money. If, in the US, the price of gas or the electricity bill go up by 10% that nation would without further ado elect Hannibal Lecter if that meant cheaper utilities. Even if that means abandoning every green initiative in favor of coal on the spot.
"...the biggest single thing the pols can do to address the crisis is also good economics without any economic cost to the government - stop subsidizing fossil fuel use (whether at production, transportation or consumption)."
Easy enough in most countries in the G8 which don't have any such subsidies in the first place - which is why the price of gas in europe is roughly upwards of 8$ the gallon and public transportation is a major thing.
Meanwhile in the US if gas prices hit 4$ per gallon whatever administration is blamed for that won't hold office for the next 20 years.
If the population is as a whole on board with tightening the ship and taking the bitter medicine politicians will be elected to carry out that will. But you try telling the average US voter, no matter how progressive, that for their children to have a future they'll need to pay in the present. They'll elect the grifter making unreasonable promises he can't keep over the inconvenient Al Gore any day.
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Re:
Your shill argument is the most idiotic and dishonest thing i have read online today. kindly fuck off all the way into the sun. In what depraved mental institution does getting billed for what isn't your fault makes any moral, legal, logical, ethical or methaphysical sense for you to go into such disgusting apologetics. Do you expect people to be grateful too?!
They are literally billing the ratepayers for profits they failed to make over the infrastructure the companies intentionally neglected. Its not like the companies have made changes to the way things were. repairing your own fuck up should not be billable to someone else. END OF FUCKING STORY!
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Incompetent and proud of it!
Yeah, the incompetence is rampant, obvious, and intentional. It's not a bug, it's a feature! EVERYONE's blood should boil at this BS, we just need to put the regulators in pots and turn on the heat until they change their ways or their blood literally boils. And the pols too, they're the ones who keep pushing this nonsense. Better yet, just bring in the guillotines and take them ALL out. Yeah yeah, French Revolution bad, maybe it's worth it. It was the headiest of times, it was the headlessiest of times, at least we won't freeze to death.
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Re: Incompetent and proud of it!
"Yeah, the incompetence is rampant, obvious, and intentional."
At every level. Bear in mind the Texas legislature looks the way it does because the texas population haven't been too good on where to draw the line in sand regarding the priorities they consider relevant and necessary in their elected representatives. Same as in any other democracy, if your leader is a moron you need to look at the apathy of those who allowed that person into power.
That lesson is a few millennia old and we, as a species, haven't really managed to go beyond Plato's saying about those who consider themselves too wise to engage in politics.
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Ummm...well, first, it's Texas.
Second, it's Texas.
Third, what else did you expect? It's Texas!
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Re: It's Texas!
And you can't spell TAXES without Texas.
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Re:
How common is natural gas in Texas anyway? I wouldn't have expected it to be used much in their climate. They'd rarely get too cold for a heat pump (which doubles as an air conditioner, which they will need), nor would I expect the cost of electrical resistive heaters to be prohibitive as the occasional backup. It's pretty easy to just cancel natural gas altogether in favor of electricity (and if those costs get too high, solar with battery and maybe diesel backup could work).
The gas companies could be speeding up their own irrelevance.
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Re: Re:
Seriously?!?! You missed the whole "no electricity because the natural gas generators and pipelines froze" ??? You been living in a cave?
It doesn't matter what kind of heating solution you have if you don't have electricity and can't get gas because the pipelines are frozen. And if you happen to get electricity during the rolling brownouts, you are now paying 10x, 50x or perhaps even 100x more for that energy. Ask Scott Willoughby in Texas, he had his lights on during the freeze which netted him an electric bill of $16752, and he is not alone in his plight.
There's a reason why Karl Bode wrote this piece and it just wooshed over your head...
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Re: Re: Re:
Are you implying that the "ratepayers" mentioned here are primarily electrical utilities, and Texans will mainly see the increase on their electrical bills? The article's text suggests much more direct impacts to me.
He'd signed up for market rates, which anybody who'd reviewed the history of spot electricity prices (or seen the legal market rate cap) would see as foolish. At the very least, if you're agreeing to prices that can change arbitrarily anytime, you'd better be watching the minute-by-minute rate updates whenever you're using electricity.
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Re: Re: Mined geologic methane
The "Natural" gas stopped pumping because of Boil's law...and is pumped and served up to their power stations in real time, with electric pumping. Starting again...
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Re: Re: We don't need no stinking heat pump
ARCO bought Montgomery Wards during the 1973 "oil crises" and shit-canned their heat-pump products, my friend's still runs 50 years after his father installed it.
Clinton was federally funding a housing block in 1999 that included Robur air-driven heat pumps, Bush-the-younger canceled the project and Robur-Serval moved from Indiana to Italy.... and the world's future lost another trim tab.
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Re: Re: Re: buy your enemy
24 November 2021: Shell oil said on Thursday it had acquired a 51% stake in a floating wind project off the west coast of Ireland, largest in the world https://www.businessreport.com/newsletters/roundup-shell-buys-into-wind-consumer-spending-huey-p-lon g-statue
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Re: Re:
"How common is natural gas in Texas anyway?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Texas
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How sad are they going to be when they learn cash & gold don't float. They don't produce oxygen, can't eat them, & they can't keep you warm or cool.
I look forward to another freeze... mainly because I am hoping CBP won't let Cruz back in.
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Re:
I mean at least you can burn money to stay warm for a bit but the rich probably wouldn't do that because to them it holds eternal power!
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Re:
Reminds me of that saying that the Interwebs credit to the Cree:
"Only after the last tree has been cut down, only after the last river has been poisoned, only after the last fish has been caught, only then will you find that money cannot be eaten."
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to much logic
Climate change.
No one has expressed WHAT it means, in a way for even an idiot can understand.
1 point that confuses the problem is mentioning that In the past, it was as bad a billion years ago and we had Plants growing like in a fantasy dream or a Jungle movie.
Things not mentioned, tend to be 'Where' they have found Old sea life. Which is a great marker of how high the water was in the past.
Another marker, is looking at old pictures of NY in the winter and the frozen lakes.
Its not just change. Many people arent seeing it, to many of them are in HOMES/Business/anyplace, EXCEPT OUTSIDE.
THe heat will cause problem in 1 major way. Moisture levels, as the ocean warms up. Clouds, storms, Rain. Some people dont understand HOW this could change things. How about low level areas in Major NY FLOODING. Where do all the rivers go? NY/NY.
Once Downtown NYNY has all their basements filled with water. THEN people will start seeing a problem.
Anyone think of a way to create something that could filter out the carbon in the ocean? Which has turned to an acid. Will make TONS of money.
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Re: to much logic
$$? Last year, Musk offered a $100,000,000 "X prize" to the person that "sequesters" C02, but Karl won't take tainted money
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Re: to much logic
"Things not mentioned, tend to be 'Where' they have found Old sea life. Which is a great marker of how high the water was in the past."
In most cases those who scream "How bad could it be?" have the answer staring them in the face every time they look at the cross-section of a rock from where they live and see the fossils of some antediluvian crustacean. Or pass sinkholes and beachfront which weren't in that place when they were young.
"Anyone think of a way to create something that could filter out the carbon in the ocean? Which has turned to an acid. Will make TONS of money."
You're thinking of Phytoplankton. The population of which, since the 50's, have drastically declined due to said acidification and the warming of the oceans.
No, science has looked at that option the same way it has looked at every other carbon sink technology, and come to the conclusion that it can be done...just not at scale. The best and most effective carbon sinks, bar none, is massive amounts of vegetation. But with drought fires increasingly burning off the forests, phytoplankton currently undergoing an extinction event and the amazon forest predicted to collapse into a shrubby plain by 2064...
The current scientific concensus already says it's too late to prevent an actual extinction event. In all likelihood human civilization is done for within the century. The fight right now is one to determine whether humanity will be left alive as a species at the end of this. And that's a battle too many people aren't even aware they're in, or refuse to see.
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Re: Re: to much logic
In regards to phytoplankton, there's a direct connection to the amount of them in the oceans and the whale population. It turns out whale-poop is an excellent source of nutrients for the phytoplankton, and where there's whales there's a lot more phytoplanktons too. And if you have more phytoplanktons it means the whole food-chain in that area thrives that much better.
TL;DR: More whale-poop leads to a better climate.
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Its simple this will happen in a few years again when texas has cold winter weather temps under 0 degrees, also the situation is even getting worse because of low regulation and taxs bitcoin miners are moving to texas ,this is regulatory capture, eg the regulators are passing laws that favour big companys over consumers literally putting lives in danger .china banned bitcoin miners ,companys are moving to places with low regulation and low taxs .
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Re: A single Bitcoin requires 1,722 kWh
Texas Wind electricity: 28% of US total, almost three times the next US state's wind generation, Iowa,10% of the US total. Good move, BitHeads.
Biden's 50 million barrels of fresh mined petroleum will produce 50 million bitcoins, 1 barrel-oil-equivalent, if you burned EVERYTHING IN THE BARREL
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Just feel that (cold and deadly) freedom
Ah the wonders of the holy Free Market, unburdened by those pesky 'regulations' or regulators and as a result able to serve the public to the peak of it's ability.
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Re: Just feel that (cold and deadly) freedom
Well, freedom is never free.
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'I get the freedom(to exploit you) and you pay the price'
Yeah, except in this case it's other people paying for the 'freedom' of companies to exploit the market and public thanks to corrupt politicians and regulators.
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Well...
Everything certainly is bigger in Texas! Can't leave the gas bill out of it now, can they?
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And its not just Texas getting screwed by Texas. Upper mid-west also is getting shafted over it via increased utility bills for the foreseeable future from the Texas event last year.
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Oh look! Reality!! Quick. Someone change the channel.
It's called Fascism.
The longer you pretend it is not, the faster it will take over all official occupations, drain your economy into foreign off-shore accounts and leave the USA in a new Depression. If you're lucky.
There is a very good reason why fascism or corporatism is often called a Police State. Cops have always protected the rich against the poor. They are historically easily purchased minions and form the first line of offense against the public in a fledgling fascist state, and yours are now working for new masters - your own billionaire citizens - whose sole goal is the liquidation of the United States of America - for fun and profit.
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Re: Oh look! Reality!! Quick. Someone change the channel.
Beg to differ. It's not fascism which is all about the state but its crony capitalism which is all about the corporations and their 1%er owners and it's leading into neo-feudalism where the 1%ers own all the shit and the government and are making the rest pay more and more rent to them for their shit.
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Re: Re: Oh look! Reality!! Quick. Someone change the channel.
"It's not fascism which is all about the state but its crony capitalism..."
So it is, but quite a lot of the adherents of the one tend to be happy adherents of the other as well. Plenty of motivation for corporations to be in the position where the state is their extended arm and legislation a way to knock out their competition. Ultra-authoritarianism is just another tool in the box to make that happen.
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Quite so. If one considers the corporations collectively in a partnership with their cronies in government as a "deep state" acting to control the state by legislation that entrenches and expand their political/economic power by rigging the political, legal, and economic systems in their favor, and that creates state-enforced monopolies for them so they get more money they can use to subvert the state even more, and that employs state power to quash any dissent or challenges to their rigged systems or their monopolies, one can consider that a form of fascism.
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Right-wing Publican Gov't Will Drown U in a Bathtub
"It's not clear how many mass-fatality events we have to live through before we embrace meaningful corruption, lobbying, and regulatory reform"
Sure it is:
All, of them, Katie.
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CRIMINAL RECORD OFF MY ASS
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