Following up on "Talk and lying versus doing: The electricity crisis in Texas is produced by state regulatory failure" and "Cold wave: the Texas power debacle disproportionately impacts the less well off."
I've been putting links to good articles in the comments of the two blog entries.
Note that one of those articles, the Wall Street Journal's "Texas Electric Bills Were $28 Billion Higher Under Deregulation," makes the point that Texas electricity deregulation has cost consumers billions, rather than saved consumers money overall. Extend that across the country, and the deregulation argument fails, at least for electricity.
-- article link
Meanwhile it's not clear that the Texas Legislature and Governor will do anything to help prevent this from happening again. Some corporations made billions from the debacle, while others lost hundreds of millions of dollars or more. And more than 200 people are dead, there are many billions of dollars in property damage, etc.
And this particular article, focused on the electricity system, didn't mention the need for resiliency steps for water systems, many of which were devastated by the loss of power, and the failure or nonexistence of backup power systems ("Texas water systems failed during February cold storm. Now, the challenge is making them stronger," Houston Chronicle).
2. Buy reliability.
3. On-site fuel.
4. Label gas facilities “critical.”
5. Housing efficiency. [Reducing demand for electricity by consumers.]
6. Rotating outages. [Through improvements to the grid and the creation of microgrids. Interestingly in DC, I learned that areas are usually hardwired to particular transmission stations, rather than being able to shift to different connections by changing a switch.]
7. Invest in batteries.
8. Drill, drill, drill. Get grid and utility operators in the habit of managing through power shortages with regular emergency drills simulating extreme weather events.
9. Clear communication.
10. Cheaper, not cheap electricity. While efficiency is an admirable goal, understand that a resilient power grid requires regular investment. That means paying a little more for electricity.
I'm pretty sure the entire point of electric regulation wasn't to make things cheaper for consumers, but the allow utilities to pass along expenses to consumer and then use competitive markets forces to control the price rather than a regulator.
ReplyDeleteI mean, someone had to pay for the largest wind installation in the world.
Investors are loving utilities that use coal power right now; they know if forced to convert to solar/wind they can they go pass along those costs + 10% to consumers to pay for it. Great returns.
That said, it's a good list. Housing efficiency may be overacted in texas. No sense in installing gas heat there. There are better heat pumps (work down to say 15 f) but with a cold snap like that not likely to either work well or be used enough. Insulation etc helps but you know what 15F feels like.
ReplyDeleteBatteries also wouldn't help as much as people say. The real point of the batteries is to stabilize voltage during a stress amount, not being to run the state for more than 15-20 minutes.
Weatherization is huge.
From the consumer side, you've got to put in price protection at extremes. The point of pricing electricity is people will hopefully use it more sparingly as price goes up; at the price edges we were seeing you can't react.
I'm gonna write about weatherization ("controlling utility costs") in a post soon. The big thing was that article on Peoria, plus how so many low income hosueholds in Baltimore are affected.
ReplyDeleteYour point about Texas, yes, there are definitely better places to target the investment. Eg I went to a conference in DC years ago on sustainability and a city person mentioned how because it doesn't get that cold in the winter, super duper winterization doesn't have the greatest payback.