Texas Blackouts Revive Deregulation Debate
For the Texas power industry, this has been a time of soul-searching angst. Three weeks ago, dozens of the state's power generators failed in frigid weather, causing the worst outages in years and spawning multiple investigations. State lawmakers are demanding to know what went wrong.
“Eighty-two units going down is unacceptable,” state Sen. Troy Fraser, R-Horseshoe Bay, said during a hearing last week in which lawmakers grilled regulators and power companies.
The rotating blackouts, which hobbled the state for eight hours on Feb. 2, have called into question one of Texas' most basic tenets: that this state does things ...
Comments (6)
Elmo
This is about greed. To use the excuse plants are down is lame at best. It is about money plain and simple. The Tribune needs to demand to see the list of plants down. They will include plants that no longer product electricity
Mike Dunn
We need less regurgitation of elected official doubletalk and more investigative journalism. A timeline of events, interviews with plant employees, etc.
Reading Frasier's statement that they are "governing" is laughable... I want to know how much stock he has in the companies he oversees on our behalf.
Michael Giberson
I wonder how many homes had frozen water pipes in Texas? I suspect the problem was worse in Texas than in North Dakota, simply because we don't usually experience the same degree of cold in Texas. Regulation or deregulation doesn't have much to do with it - it just doesn't usually make sense to be prepared for such cold because it usually doesn't get that cold.
Elmo
Michael
Deregulation had everything to do with it. Did you not see due to this, they were charging 3000 per kilowat hour instead of 25 for wholesale electricity ?Who made this money? As for as the cold. Come on now this is bogus. Everyone is prepsared for the cold. Are we that backwards?
Michael Giberson
The $3,000 per MW price was only paid to generators that could produce extra power during the shortage. Most generators had already committed their power at day ahead or under longer term contracts, and probably were paid something close to the average price for this time of year. Some generators were under contract to supply power that morning, but couldn't due to their equipment failures, and so had to PAY the $3,000 per MW price to cover for their failure to provide power they had contracted to supply.
You suggest deregulated generators were raking in the money at the expense of consumers, but some very big generators like Luminant lost lots of money. Luminant reported to the SEC an expected $30,000,000 loss due to the failures on Feb. 2 and the need to buy replacement power.
Any well prepared retailer had contracts covering most or all of the power needs that morning, and so are not exposed to a lot of excess costs due to the real time price. If your retailer was unprepared, then they lost a lot of money and may go out of business. Buy from a better company next time.
Elmo
I can't buy from anyone else. David Sibley made sure of that. Like most rural Texans, I am on a COOP and cannot switch.High rates and sorry service