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Texas in Crisis

ZiprHead said:
His Lights Stayed on During Texas’ Storm. Now He Owes $16,752

SAN ANTONIO — As millions of Texans shivered in dark, cold homes over the past week while a winter storm devastated the state’s power grid and froze natural gas production, those who could still summon lights with the flick of a switch felt lucky.

Now, many of them are paying a severe price for it.

“My savings is gone,” said Scott Willoughby, a 63-year-old Army veteran who lives on Social Security payments in a Dallas suburb. He said he had nearly emptied his savings account so that he would be able to pay the $16,752 electric bill charged to his credit card — 70 times what he usually pays for all of his utilities combined. “There’s nothing I can do about it, but it’s broken me.”

Mr. Willoughby is among scores of Texans who have reported skyrocketing electric bills as the price of keeping lights on and refrigerators humming shot upward. For customers whose electricity prices are not fixed and are instead tied to the fluctuating wholesale price, the spikes have been astronomical.

The outcry elicited angry calls for action from lawmakers from both parties and prompted Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, to hold an emergency meeting with legislators on Saturday to discuss the enormous bills.
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Is this how Texas turns blue, when the folks whose lights stayed on get burned too?
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No, the relief package for the emergency? Those funds will be used to pay off those bills. Rewarding the power companies for their unpreparedness, sating their investors, and making no changes necessary.
 
TomC said:
all face at least several weeks to resume normal operations, people familiar with the situation said. Gasoline prices at the pump could reach $3 a gallon in May as long outages crimp supply ahead of the driving season, said Patrick DeHaan, head of petroleum analysis for retailer tracker GasBuddy.
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WTF?

Right now, in the depths of Trump virus epidemic, we're paying around 2.60/gal. That's with tons of people out of work, or working from home, or whatever.

If the Biden administration manages to boost us out of the Trump administration's mess, I fully expect gas to be $1 more per gallon by May, and the driving season.
And I live in "low cost of living" southern Indiana.

$3.60/gal. by May is a fairly optimistic guess. Unless, of course, you're a Texan oil man. Maybe Trump and Cruz can take better care of their big donors and gas will be $4 something.
Tom
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Yeah, it feels strange but high gas prices are actually a good sign.
 
I guess in Texas it is one’s own personal responsibility to find out what the going rates are for electricity because you can then decide if you want to turn off your power before getting charged.
 
Keith&Co. said:
ZiprHead said:
His Lights Stayed on During Texas’ Storm. Now He Owes $16,752

SAN ANTONIO — As millions of Texans shivered in dark, cold homes over the past week while a winter storm devastated the state’s power grid and froze natural gas production, those who could still summon lights with the flick of a switch felt lucky.

Now, many of them are paying a severe price for it.

“My savings is gone,” said Scott Willoughby, a 63-year-old Army veteran who lives on Social Security payments in a Dallas suburb. He said he had nearly emptied his savings account so that he would be able to pay the $16,752 electric bill charged to his credit card — 70 times what he usually pays for all of his utilities combined. “There’s nothing I can do about it, but it’s broken me.”

Mr. Willoughby is among scores of Texans who have reported skyrocketing electric bills as the price of keeping lights on and refrigerators humming shot upward. For customers whose electricity prices are not fixed and are instead tied to the fluctuating wholesale price, the spikes have been astronomical.

The outcry elicited angry calls for action from lawmakers from both parties and prompted Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, to hold an emergency meeting with legislators on Saturday to discuss the enormous bills.
Click to expand...

Is this how Texas turns blue, when the folks whose lights stayed on get burned too?
Click to expand...
No, the relief package for the emergency? Those funds will be used to pay off those bills. Rewarding the power companies for their unpreparedness, sating their investors, and making no changes necessary.
Click to expand...

If I had money to invest, I would short the stocks of these companies that suckered people into doing business with an electrical supplier that had variable rates. After this, nobody in his or her right mind will do business with any company with that business model. Maybe federal money won't be going to bankrupt companies after all.
 
Wow, I did not know it was even a thing. I understand variable rate throughout a day. But unlimited rate? That's just stupid.
They should at least have upper limit after which you turn thing down.
 
In CT I can choose my supplier from a dozen or so sources. Variable rate or fixed and the duration, and whether there are fees attached. I just got locked-in for 3 years at $0.0759/KWH and no cancellation fee if it should go down and I want to switch. That doesn't include the delivery charge which can also vary. But I think that wouldn't be related to demand.
 
barbos said:
Wow, I did not know it was even a thing. I understand variable rate throughout a day. But unlimited rate? That's just stupid.
They should at least have upper limit after which you turn thing down.
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Yes, it is stupid. Yes, there should have been an upper limit. But there wasn't. This is going to linger on for years in Texas. Right wing Texas: "Government regulation baaaaaaaad!". And what did we learn from all of this?
 
Loren Pechtel said:
TomC said:
all face at least several weeks to resume normal operations, people familiar with the situation said. Gasoline prices at the pump could reach $3 a gallon in May as long outages crimp supply ahead of the driving season, said Patrick DeHaan, head of petroleum analysis for retailer tracker GasBuddy.
Click to expand...

WTF?

Right now, in the depths of Trump virus epidemic, we're paying around 2.60/gal. That's with tons of people out of work, or working from home, or whatever.

If the Biden administration manages to boost us out of the Trump administration's mess, I fully expect gas to be $1 more per gallon by May, and the driving season.
And I live in "low cost of living" southern Indiana.

$3.60/gal. by May is a fairly optimistic guess. Unless, of course, you're a Texan oil man. Maybe Trump and Cruz can take better care of their big donors and gas will be $4 something.
Tom
Click to expand...

Yeah, it feels strange but high gas prices are actually a good sign.
Click to expand...
What? High gas prices can mean a couple things, but usually it means supply is tight to demand and there is little wiggle room for more supply.
 
Cheerful Charlie said:
barbos said:
Wow, I did not know it was even a thing. I understand variable rate throughout a day. But unlimited rate? That's just stupid.
They should at least have upper limit after which you turn thing down.
Click to expand...

Yes, it is stupid. Yes, there should have been an upper limit. But there wasn't. This is going to linger on for years in Texas. Right wing Texas: "Government regulation baaaaaaaad!". And what did we learn from all of this?
Click to expand...
Texas: we may not have heat, electricity, or water in the winter, but we have freedom the rest of the year.
 
Texas, demonstrating Isolationism working most of the time isn't as good as things working all of the time.
 
Sheldon Whitehouse on Twitter: "All this shows how deeply the Republican Party is controlled by the fossil fuel industry. Think puppets on a string. Expose dark money, and you expose this link, which is why Republicans fight disclosure. (link)" / Twitter
noting
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott falsely blames wind turbines, Green New Deal for power grid outages - The Washington Post
Like many other Republicans, Perry also falsely blamed frozen wind turbines for the mass outages, when a widespread failure to invest in winterizing power sources and frozen natural gas pipes played a far bigger role. ...
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Gov. Abbott
The governor’s arguments were contradicted by his own energy department, which outlined how most of Texas’s energy losses came from failures to winterize the power-generating systems, including fossil fuel pipelines, The Washington Post’s Will Englund reported. But Abbott’s debunked claims were echoed by other conservatives this week who have repeatedly blamed clean energy sources for the outages crippling the southern U.S.

In fact, typically mild winters and a lack of state regulations in Texas combined to leave electricity providers unprepared for the extreme cold that has suddenly hit the state, The Post reported. Nearly every source of energy — from wind turbines to natural gas to nuclear power — have failed to some degree following a harsh storm that covered the region with thick layers of snow and ice.

...
The governor was not the only prominent Texas Republican to blame clean energy for the historic power outages. After Fox News host Tucker Carlson inaccurately told viewers that the state’s power grid had become “totally reliant on windmills,” Perry joined Carlson in railing against the Green New Deal, which has not been enacted in Texas or nationally.

“If this Green New Deal goes forward the way that the Biden administration appears to want it to, then we’ll have more events like we’ve had in Texas all across the country,” Perry said in another Fox News segment.
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Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-TX
“Bottom line: Thank God for baseload energy made up of fossil fuels,” Crenshaw tweeted. “Had our grid been more reliant on the wind turbines that froze, the outages would have been much worse.”
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Mira Kamdar on Twitter: ""The horrors currently unfolding in Texas expose both the reality of the climate crisis and the extreme vulnerability of fossil fuel infrastructure in the face of that crisis. So of course the Green New Deal finds itself under fierce attack." @NaomiAKlein https://t.co/JPPEEtn8ef" / Twitter
noting
Opinion | Why Texas Republicans Fear the Green New Deal - The New York Times - "Small government is no match for a crisis born of the state’s twin addictions to market fixes and fossil fuels."
Since the power went out in Texas, the state’s most prominent Republicans have tried to pin the blame for the crisis on, of all things, a sweeping progressive mobilization to fight poverty, inequality and climate change. “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal,” Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said Wednesday on Fox News. Pointing to snow-covered solar panels, Rick Perry, a former governor who was later an energy secretary for the Trump administration, declared in a tweet “that if we humans want to keep surviving frigid winters, we are going to have to keep burning natural gas — and lots of it — for decades to come.”

...
A fateful series of decisions were made in the late-’90s, when the now-defunct, scandal-plagued energy company Enron led a successful push to radically deregulate Texas’s electricity sector. As a result, decisions about the generation and distribution of power were stripped from regulators and, in effect, handed over to private energy companies. Unsurprisingly, these companies prioritized short-term profit over costly investments to maintain the grid and build in redundancies for extreme weather.

...
This energy-market free-for-all means that as the snow finally melts, many Texans are discovering that they owe their private electricity providers thousands of dollars — a consequence of leaving pricing to the whims of the market. The $200,000 energy bills some people received, the photos of which went viral online, were, it seems, a mistake. But some bills approaching $10,000 are the result of simple supply and demand in a radically underregulated market. “The last thing an awful lot of people need right now is a higher electric bill,” said Matt Schulz, chief industry analyst with LendingTree. “And that’s unfortunately something a lot of people will get stuck with.” This is bad news for those customers, but great news for shale gas companies like Comstock Resources Inc. On an earnings call last Wednesday, its chief financial officer said, “This week is like hitting the jackpot with some of these incredible prices.”
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So much for the self-regulating market. Markets succeed in some things, but not so much in others.
 
Shadowy Man said:
I guess in Texas it is one’s own personal responsibility to find out what the going rates are for electricity because you can then decide if you want to turn off your power before getting charged.
Click to expand...

It depends on what power provider you sign up with. The people that are getting really burned are the ones that signed up with one that simply passes on market rates--of course they are typically cheaper because they offload the market risk onto the consumer.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
Loren Pechtel said:
Yeah, it feels strange but high gas prices are actually a good sign.
Click to expand...
What? High gas prices can mean a couple things, but usually it means supply is tight to demand and there is little wiggle room for more supply.
Click to expand...

But demand goes up when people feel like using their cars more--it's a sign of better economic times.
 
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