This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1360903
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1360903
They seem to be making progress today according to interview I just heard,seem to be down to 40,000 or so with out power from over a million or so yesterday.
More info
I’ll add this absurdity
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No doubt this fact warms the hearts of the remaining 40,000.
Maybe even the heart of Ted Cruz, if he has one.
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What is Texas going to do about the billing going forward?
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Nice circumspect article. Can’t help but notice the lead is buried a little. Yes all the generating sources faultered, but running out of gas pressure to plants was pretty much what happened. Jeff Skilling is now out of jail, he’s got a new venture started looking for investors in some “digital generation” oil and gas market.
It might only show its white belly when people die, but the crooked pirating and profiteering is baked in.
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There has been remarkably little comment on the isolated nature of ERCOT. Most other grid systems have links to broader areas, so the problems in Texas have been more severe than in other places. The isolation of ERCOT is/was a political decision to avoid Federal regulation and dates back to the 1930s and the utility scandals and related regulations. Similarly Texas has had an internal oil and gas market. While Texas is big and somewhat climatically diverse, not enough to counter the systemic risk of an insular market.
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From above post.
“It’s unknown if something will be done at the state level to aide in the high costs of such energy bills.”
You know what that means.
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There is no secret that privatizing utilities and deregulating their operations will end up further enriching a few really wealthy conservatives and provide decades of problems for consumers. We see it being duplicated in every red state. All we get is excuses and no bipartisan cooperation in trying to fix what they have broken.
We really are such a great country which produces some of the best and most creative engineers and scientists. We can go to Mars and back now. But Republicans keep deliberately breaking everything they produce trying to send us up back to the Old Testament disasters.
Space Force? That’s a cartoon. NASA? That’s one hell of a government agency. Texas should stop promoting their Texas Ranger stereotypes and remember when NASA engineers brought the world to their doorstep.
Just let the experts run things. You don’t deserve the freedom and liberty to torture your citizens, you Republican dotards.
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They want to hear more screaming? Okay. I was watching the video of the Mars landing. It was amazing and the first picture, a bit blurry at first, sharpened nicely. I’m glad all that hard work paid off. Awesome achievement.
Nice it’ll be fun to see all three landers, ours, China’s and the UAE’s, hide from each other. 
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Sell the bills to debt collectors. Free markets, you know.
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I’m hoping it’ll be more like robot wars. 
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I read somewhere that the price of electricity in Texas had peaked at it’s maximum allowed cost of $90,000/Kwh yesterday afternoon.
That’s how they wring the “efficiency” (and profits) out of the system, by floating the price on a minute by minute basis based on demand, not supply.
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What So Many Of The Misleading Narratives About Texas Miss
Let’s start with truth and fact.
My best friend lives in San Antonio. The interior temp of his house on Sunday was 54 degrees and his elderly mother lives with him and his wife. They had to rescue their daughter in law from her home because she couldn’t get out; her husband was working the Enterprise car rental at the San Antonio airport as the only worker there for two days and dealing with all the Spring break people needing rentals - he did 100 rentals in two days. By himself.
And my friend had no idea that turbine/wind power in Texas makes up a total of 13% of the available power.
ETA: He also didn’t know there were working turbines in Antarctica and that a fair portion of our power here in MN and WI comes from wind turbines. Properly weatherized in all cases.
Heaven forbid the Right should tell the frikkin’ truth.
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I just want to add, that whatever weatherization happens that should include preparedness for winter freeze, summer heat, and heavy rains. Also it would not hurt to encourage and subsidize better weatherization of your homes and businesses to make them keep and retain heat and cold better. Texas usually does things on the cheap for businesses sake, that crap needs to end. Here in central TX, many older homes are built out of limestone, and those old houses out-perform new homes, so the Old folks made them right for the environment not to mention we have an abundance of limestone throughout central texas because millions of years ago, Texas was under water for most of the state.
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Just a point: the mars return mission is entirely hypothetical. It is just a proposal. But the new mars rover will leave samples in designated places for potential retrieval to earth some years from now (decades, really).
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I remember when Carter provided interest free loans for people to insulate their homes. Lots of people took advantage of that.
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These failures highlight the unique vulnerabilities of relying so heavily on natural gas for power. Only gas electricity relies on a continuous supply of a fossil fuel delivered from hundreds of miles away. And that fuel is also needed for heat. So when an Arctic blast drives up demand and drives down supply of heat and electricity at the same time, power plants languish in line while homes and hospitals get the heating fuel they need.
Understated point in many of the “natural gas vs renewable” discussions. Natural gas is the most likely fuel to catastrophically fail during the heaviest demands.
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As did Obama;
It is funny how dems always push plans that think long term, where as the GOP is always thinking short term. If a country does not plan for the long term, then it is always reacting and this costs the government, business, and its citizens more money than preparing. Business 101.
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The Texas fiasco shows what happens when the accountants run power companies rather than the engineers. What they had done in effect was to create a system where a single point of failure (i.e., gas lines freezing) could take it down. And they didn’t winterize the wind farms.
There is a reason that where the profit and loss is not the be all and end all things are made to function in all conditions. That is the reason why we have military specification parts; you would not be a happy camper if your rifle didn’t function at minus 20.
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I know! One of the things my wife who works in the health consulting loved about my work for the military is that they had 10, 15 and 20 year plans and budgeted out those plans.
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