In Texas, Storms Cause More Outages Than Grid Failures
It’s a rare but familiar event: arriving home and the clock is blinking. That happened in a Midland neighborhood last week, when the lights went out in more than 600 homes Friday night because of electrical equipment problems. A more serious power outage affected nearly all of Lubbock for a few hours in July, with malfunctioning equipment again to blame.
The average Texan experiences a few hundred minutes of power outages each year, according to a major report recently by the Brattle Group, which has done consulting for the Texas power grid.
If Texans are already used to the ...
Comments (3)
Randall Chapman
Very good reporting on an important issue. Gold plating transmission systems may not significantly improve reliability for residential customers. Interesting that your article refers to blackouts. ERCOT and the utilities demand that their PR folks only call them "outages" The nearly $1 billion taxed to ratepayers for high tech meters, similarly, has not resulted in one Kwh of new required generation.
Rudy Gonzales
Grid failures, rolling black-outs and Coal powered generating plants are to be blamed instead of ERCOT and Austin power brokers. The electrical market in Texas should have the lowest costs in the world as natural gas is cheap and plenty-full. The Texas electrical grid prices are supposed to be based on the cost of natural gas. But wait - Texas has been building coal-powered production facilities even though Texas power mongers in Austin has known about EPA rules and regulations for over twelve years. The PUC and the Legislature have deliberately dragged their feet in implementing EPA rules without regard to federal regulations for the money-ed people who pull the purse strings of the politicians in Austin. De-regulation was supposed to have provided lower bills which has yet to come to fruition. ERCOT, the Texas PUC and the Legislature have failed grossly to provide their fiduciary function to the people of Texas. This is what happens to a one party state.
John Robert Behrman
The "one party" includes Democrats and Republicans who collude with each other to divvy-up legalized graft derived from the tenders and factors of financial intermediation and government monopolies.
This is, sadly, like the state capitalism of the old Soviet Union or, for that matter, the mafia capitalism of the new Russia.
The ideological sniping over "capitalism" and "socialism" that figures in political pop-rhetoric disguises the simple fact that national public debt to achieve macroeconomic balance -- "Keynesianism" -- works but not as the scale-up or bail-out of corrupt lending and borrowing practices by unregulated firms or improvident state and local governments..
Keynesian borrowing and spending is sometimes warranted and sometimes not. But, it is never a panacea: In particular, it is flat wrong when run-up simply to avoid progressive taxation or to squander on military or, for that matter, civilian "gold plating" as mentioned above.
That is the kind of Keynesianism Republicans since Nixon just love.
Moreover, government-guaranteed or habitually bailed-out private and municipal debt is, actually, anti-Keynesian, specifically, "Austrian". It is very simply the sort of "socialism for the rich" Molly Ivins used to complain about. And, in the instant case, it leads to ridiculous cross-hauling of electricity and failure to maintain the grid as well as abject failure to conserve electricity through economic, rather than financial, engineering.
Basically, our political and financial intermediaries "game" financial markets to earn fees, commissions, rents, and speculative gains from politically unwholesome privileges, immunities, and simple insider information. These games patently do not produce economic growth or reliable engineering. Rather, they aggravates economic inequality and financial instability.
Yes, this is a "one party" -- political monopoly -- problem. But, it is not the problem of one or the other name party on the ballot. It is the problem of a self-perpetuating political elite that spans both parties and degenerates into plutocracy.
Nowhere is that more evident than in the consensus in some states on some "infrastructure spending". From a macro-economic perspective spending on infrastructure is a good thing and quite timely now. But, drill down and you will not find anything in the municipal or utility bond indentures that is conducive to good design, operational engineering, or even sound finance. What you find is provision for the indemnification of criminal negligence and diffusion of responsibility for malfeasance that turns into "stranded costs" borne by the public, not into jail time for the political and professional culprits.
If there were, both political parties would be stronger, civic discourse would be more robust and realistic, and ... good journalists would make more money than "transaction lawyers", formerly "bond lawyers", or, as I call them, pirates and brigands of the ex-Confederacy.