The U.S. Department of Energy Thursday announced a $1.5 billion transmission investment to improve electric grid reliability. The DOE also released a new electric grid transmission study.
As I understand it, Texas republicans pushed to privatize the state’s electrical grid, and allow “provider choice” in way that has led to extreme profit-taking by private entities and reduced any investment in infrastructure. This contributed to the extremely high prices that some Texans have been paying in the winter, as well as more frequent and sever outages.
We could consider this a bailout because private entities sucked all the money out of the system, and now the federal government is investing to try and get it into a working state again.
Texas is solidly in the lower half of US states for residential energy costs. You probably read about some people who bought into a “wholesale” energy provider who got fucked during the winter storm in 2021, but that situation involved a very small number of people who made a bad choice and does not generalize to the whole state.
I honestly think the inverse of what you’re saying is true…Texas invested billions in the 2000s in transmission capacity between West Texas and where everyone lives in Central and East Texas, opening up West Texas to wind and solar development. Texas is now #1 in wind generating capacity and #2 in solar, after California.
All that mess that happened in 2021 was due to corruption within the Texas Railroad Commission, which had the power to force natural gas electric generating facilities to winterize but did not do so. When the temperature dropped to 4°, the natural gas plants froze and went offline almost all at once, causing an immediate drop in power supply necessitating severe and immediate power cuts statewide to protect the grid from failure. Circuits were reenergized slowly over the following few days, but it stayed really cold for really long. I had personally never been through weather even remotely like that in my 35 years in Texas.
All the other outages you’ve heard about in Texas were mechanical outages, localized areas where power lines were damaged by weather, like Austin in the '23 ice storm or Houston after Hurricane Beryl this past July. People on here generalize these to “Texas’s grid is failing again!”, but every state and every nation faces the same challenges with weather-related mechanical outages.
Texas’s grid is crap. It’s far too unregulated and operators do not focus on the right sorts of improvements that will enhance grid stability. Sure, production is great, which means prices are low, but when you ignore warning calls, you invite disaster. They knew, and they chose not to enforce regulations that other states enforce. Other states deal with far colder weather. This was a failure of regulation. And they also fail to maintain basic system design, so a normal power fault can grow out of control to take out power to most of west Texas.
Anyway - sorry. That’s just a pet annoyance of mine. I hate it when pro-corporate governmental policies are seen as a positive thing based on limited metrics. Lower rates amidst poorer performance is not what I’d consider a marker of success. People die, have their homes and property damaged, and lose a lot of money during power outages.
While the chronic underinvestment in their infrastructure is still an issue, the recently announced infrastructure investment is geared toward transmission and generation, which wouldn’t (directly) address their reliability woes.
It seems to me that the goal of this allocation is to build generation capacity in states with space for solar (and possibly wind, although the Biden admin isn’t trying to bootstrap the wind industry in the U.S.). And also build transmission capacity to get that power out of those states and into other areas of the country. (And possibly back in, should they face local problems.)
My hunch is that they want to get some of that renewable power out west, to have a backup the next time the Colorado river/areas that currently get power from the Hoover Dam suffer from a drought, and to feed power up to the east coast so they can decarbonize more easily.
As I understand it, Texas republicans pushed to privatize the state’s electrical grid, and allow “provider choice” in way that has led to extreme profit-taking by private entities and reduced any investment in infrastructure. This contributed to the extremely high prices that some Texans have been paying in the winter, as well as more frequent and sever outages.
We could consider this a bailout because private entities sucked all the money out of the system, and now the federal government is investing to try and get it into a working state again.
Texas is solidly in the lower half of US states for residential energy costs. You probably read about some people who bought into a “wholesale” energy provider who got fucked during the winter storm in 2021, but that situation involved a very small number of people who made a bad choice and does not generalize to the whole state.
I honestly think the inverse of what you’re saying is true…Texas invested billions in the 2000s in transmission capacity between West Texas and where everyone lives in Central and East Texas, opening up West Texas to wind and solar development. Texas is now #1 in wind generating capacity and #2 in solar, after California.
All that mess that happened in 2021 was due to corruption within the Texas Railroad Commission, which had the power to force natural gas electric generating facilities to winterize but did not do so. When the temperature dropped to 4°, the natural gas plants froze and went offline almost all at once, causing an immediate drop in power supply necessitating severe and immediate power cuts statewide to protect the grid from failure. Circuits were reenergized slowly over the following few days, but it stayed really cold for really long. I had personally never been through weather even remotely like that in my 35 years in Texas.
All the other outages you’ve heard about in Texas were mechanical outages, localized areas where power lines were damaged by weather, like Austin in the '23 ice storm or Houston after Hurricane Beryl this past July. People on here generalize these to “Texas’s grid is failing again!”, but every state and every nation faces the same challenges with weather-related mechanical outages.
You’re both sorta wrong (and sorta right).
Texas’s grid is crap. It’s far too unregulated and operators do not focus on the right sorts of improvements that will enhance grid stability. Sure, production is great, which means prices are low, but when you ignore warning calls, you invite disaster. They knew, and they chose not to enforce regulations that other states enforce. Other states deal with far colder weather. This was a failure of regulation. And they also fail to maintain basic system design, so a normal power fault can grow out of control to take out power to most of west Texas.
Anyway - sorry. That’s just a pet annoyance of mine. I hate it when pro-corporate governmental policies are seen as a positive thing based on limited metrics. Lower rates amidst poorer performance is not what I’d consider a marker of success. People die, have their homes and property damaged, and lose a lot of money during power outages.
While the chronic underinvestment in their infrastructure is still an issue, the recently announced infrastructure investment is geared toward transmission and generation, which wouldn’t (directly) address their reliability woes.
It seems to me that the goal of this allocation is to build generation capacity in states with space for solar (and possibly wind, although the Biden admin isn’t trying to bootstrap the wind industry in the U.S.). And also build transmission capacity to get that power out of those states and into other areas of the country. (And possibly back in, should they face local problems.)
My hunch is that they want to get some of that renewable power out west, to have a backup the next time the Colorado river/areas that currently get power from the Hoover Dam suffer from a drought, and to feed power up to the east coast so they can decarbonize more easily.