Bookmarking this for the next time white supremacists here in good ole’ South Africa peddles the “privatisation is the only thing that will fix our electricity problems!” bullcrap.
Thanks, Texas!
No no no, that’s not true privatization. True privatization would fix all the problems
Satire on point.
Privatisation can only work if the end consumers have genuine choice.
In the UK electricity is privatised and I can pick from dozens of companies. This honestly works pretty well, and you can pick the cheapest depending on when you use electricity and how much. It’s the same infrastructure no matter who you pick, but that seems handled fairly well. Same with internet providers.
We also privatised water, and we just get given a company to rule over each area of the country. Unsurprisingly, given the consumer has no recourse other than “have no water” this is an absolute fucking shit-show. They’ve not invested in enough reservoirs, nor sewage handling, and instead lobby the government to make it legal to just put it in the rivers instead. It’s the same story with trains.
The Enrons are Enroning the faces.
Texas under Republicans is a disaster as an ongoing concern
Pretty sure they are happy they don’t have “communism” when they pay those bills.
Imagine all those Californians that moved to Texas.
Seriously they deserve what they get for not appreciating what they had.
Funny, I was thinking the same of the New Yorkers who moved to Texas. I live in New York (not the City) and yah the state has problems, but you couldn’t pay me to move to a Southern state…
IDK, coming from NYC to TX is probably a net upgrade in a lot of ways, especially if you’re a small business owner or work for one. The laws in NYC are just so bonkers.
Then again, I’m uninterested in moving to TX either. I’m pretty happy here in Utah, and I may move back home to Seattle, WA at some point, or maybe we’ll move to NC. But I’m not moving anywhere further south than NC.
Honestly Louis Rossmans experience as a small business owner living the real life Kafka novel in new Yorks legal system made me never want to live there.
Yah the taxes in NYS (not NYC) are one of the problems I mentioned, but on the other hand I’ve seen what they paid for. As an Upstate NY resident I have a love/hate relationship with NYC. On one hand it causes a lot of funky laws to be passed at the state level. On the other hand it brings in a FUCK TON of tax revenue that Upstate benefits from
Some, but there are a lot of people here who recognize the hypocrisy and trash policies put into place in the state by politicians who do not wish to govern, only consolidate power.
Do this lot of people vote?
They do, but Texas is one of the most difficult states to register to vote. Voter suppression is real and by design.
This explains it well: Texas’s Voter-Registration Laws Are Straight Out of the Jim Crow Playbook
and Analysis: It’s harder to vote in Texas than in any other state
That’s really dumb. Here in Utah, you sign up online, and you can get a mail ballot online too. I have never actually voted in person, I just fill out my ballot and drop it in one of the collection bins a few days before the election. We can even track our ballot to ensure it gets processed.
Why overcomplicate it? I don’t need to take time off to vote, and I can take my time researching the candidates. Voting should be easy.
I will never get why you have to Register at all
There are actual checks and balance to ensure you’re a citizen and you vote at most once
Where I live you just get a letter some weeks before the election. With that letter you can vote at the place that is named in the letter (or anywhere in the same city). If you lose the letter you can still vote with your id-card, but only at the place that was named in the letter.
Easy, isn’t it?
That‘s one of the consequences of not having citizen IDs, because they’re communist.
Texas is really good at gerrymandeirng
I wish it was possible to vote strongly enough for gerrymandering to be irrelevant.
Another 51% win for Biden will certainly trigger another violent inssurection attempt and another 4 years of inaction.
The best outcome would be a landslide victory if only to show the republican voters that their ideas are not supported by the general public.
51% win for Biden seems insanely optimistic right now.
it would take so little for Biden to rake in the votes but the Democrats in general seem to be doing everything they can to embarrass themselves even worse than 2016 …
That’s a cop out. There are plenty of terrible people in that state.
We’ve learned nothing from the 2021 winter storm that killed over 200 people.
They did change one thing. You used to be able to get electricity at wholesale prices from certain providers. When the rates went crazy during the 2021 storm and people’s crazy bills for turning on the lamp blew up on the news, they shut down that option.
These rate surges do hurt customers, but now it’s in the form of rate increases when their contract expires.
Thank you for the clarification.
Instead of requiring weatherization, they allowed power plants to opt out.
Lawmakers on the Senate Business and Commerce Committee were frustrated that the new law allows natural gas companies to opt out of weatherization requirements if they don’t voluntarily declare themselves to be “critical infrastructure” with the state.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/09/28/texas-power-grid-loophole/
It’s absolutely wild. The last time around, people died, and a lot more were put into financial hardship due to the shitty, hypercapitalist energy infrastructure. People were rightly ripshit angry about it.
And then nothing was done about any of it.
And then people keep voting for the politicians who created and perpetuated the situation.
It’s really hard to keep giving a shit about people who actively work and vote to make their own lives worse.
they almost learned nothing. The grid almost shutdown this time, instead of shutting down…
Sure we have: profits are worth more than 200 lives, and counting.
Rationality is out of the window. Ideology is the new religion. They don’t want to become “socialists” even though they don’t know what it truly means.
“Socialism is when capitalism.”
It’s almost scary to think of how bad it would have to get in order for voters to tick the boxes for Greens or Libertarians.
Like, how badly do these fuckers have to fail before you’re willing to shed your partisan jersey and vote to your own benefit?
well we did learn that when shit hits the fan Rafael Edward Cruz likes taking vacay down south of de border way
Correct.
Didn’t the state basically re-elect everyone who oversaw that shit show?
Not only did they re-elect them, deregulating the power grid even more was an explicit part of the Republican platform
Partisanship is a hell of a drug.
Desire for more money overrides literally every other thought for those who have the most
WINNING! /s
What year in a row ia this?
I don’t know but it started making international news during the pandemic, so at least 5th.
I live in Texas and have already received 2 notices this spring to conserve electricity. It has barely hit 90, and they aren’t able to keep up with demand. They get the same weather reports we have access to, up to 14-21 days, yet they can’t/won’t anticipate demand?
It’s almost like they have a financial incentive to pull this shit.
In 2000/2001 this same shit was being done in California, leading to rolling blackouts and record-high energy prices. One company was buying all the plants and shutting them down for “maintenance” specifically to increase energy prices.
There were going to be congressional hearings over it in early 2022, but that company was Enron, and at the end of 2001 they collapsed due to other bullshit they were pulling.
|early 2022
Bit late, if you ask me.
2002
Whoopsie ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Fun fact, in case you weren’t aware; Texas pays bitcoin mining companies to shut off their rigs during peak demand.
Miners love this; in effect they can just threaten to mine bitcoin and get paid as much as they would have made actually mining bitcoin, but without the wear and tear on their expensive hardware. It’s a legalized extortion racket being enacted on the public purse.
Apologies if I just gave you even more reason to be angry.
didn’t mining costs just double? gl with that
It’s not a coincidence that Texas is a hotbed of development for “microgrid” systems to cover for when ERCOT shits the bed – and of course all those systems are made up of diesel and natural gas generator farms, because Texans don’t want any of that communist solar power!
I’ve got family in Texas who love it there for some reason, but there’s almost no amount of money you could pay me to move there. Bad enough when I have to work on projects in the state – contrary to the popular narrative, in my personal opinion it’s a worse place than California to try and build something, and that’s entirely to do with the personalities that seem to gravitate to positions of power there. I’d much rather slog through the bureaucracy in Cali than tiptoe around a tinpot dictator in the planning department.
Not to mention their Governor, who seems to be in a race with FL’s Governor for the “evil monster of the century award.”
Governor hot wheels!
I am a power grid engineer and we are quoting multiple solar systems with BESS capabilities a month for Texas. It’s not all diesel.
I exaggerate – but Magic Rock is doing booming business installing strings of natural gas generators at Buc-ee’s across the state, and I’m currently dealing with an institutional client who wanted to provide backup power for a satellite campus, and didn’t even stop to consider battery-backed PV on the way to asking for a natural gas generator farm.
At least we’re trying to make reforms to our bureaucracy here in California, the problems mostly originate on the county and city levels. As for why the state is/was rather decentralized relatively speaking, well its cause we roughly the size of Great Britain (the island not the empire) and half the state is mountainous to some degree.
shitty cruel systems texas likes to inflict on its citizens, the gun-totingest murican motherfuckers there are. kinda surprised they just bend over and take it
nothing but steers and queers in texas
my favourite scene of that movie is when that drill instructor got shot.
Everything’s bigger in Texas, even the power bill.
Everything is bigger in Texas
* Except the paycheck
The weather has absolutely nothing to do with that
Like we literally watched this kind of behavior with Enron (though they mainly spooked the california government into buying more). Is anyone looking more closely at these operations?
I guess they’ll have to shut down their bootstrap-pulling engines for awhile.
Texas indeed has been blessed with much sunlight to make solar energy quite viable. This includes solar hot water heaters, and many trees to grow with vigour and bio-filtrate.
and many trees to grow with vigour
Not so vigorous when climate change causes a massive drought.
They have 591 km of coastline.
lots of salt water + lots of solar energy = lots of desalinated water
What do you do with all the leftover toxic brine?
Presumably it’s toxic mostly because of the concentration of salt.
If it can’t be used—and up north salt is used in winter for roads—it can be cleaned a bit, diluted with more seawater and discharged back into the ocean.
((the brine of 1 mass unit of seawater that’s been desalinated) + 20 units of regular seawater) ÷ 20 = 20 units of 5% saltier seawater discharged
You make it sound so safe and easy. It isn’t.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/desalination-pours-more-toxic-brine-ocean-previously-thought
What is their ratios-of-brine to seawater do they use?
It’s nice that you think you, without any experience in the matter, can solve problems with desalination that engineers in the field can’t, but I doubt you are actually able to.
I love me some bio-filtrate
Texas has also become a hotbed for bitcoin mining, adding to electricity demand, as the state’s deregulated power market and abundance of cheap natural gas became attractive to the energy-intensive sector.
Hmm.
That actually might make a lot of sense.
So, if Texas has inexpensive electricity most of the time, but also has occasional high price spikes…bitcoin mining is something where you do not need power now. Sure, you’re losing money on your hardware and space if it’s not running, but my guess is that bitcoin miners probably can do just fine shutting their systems down when prices rise above a certain point. That would tend to smooth out electricity prices.
I’d been trying to think of electricity users that could defer usage and use a lot of electricity, which are something that you want if you have wildly-varying demand and want to smooth it out, and I suppose that coin mining is actually probably a pretty good example.
