> Some of these tactics have proven controversial with consumers. One program that pays big power users like cryptocurrency operations millions to conserve, has come under particular scrutiny, as Texans have been asked to conserve voluntarily for months.
The original idea behind this is sound. Because production and consumption must net to ~0, from the grid's perspective cutting load is just as valuable as providing generative capacity.
Imagine you own a factory that typically runs 24/7 and is part of the system's base load. There is a material cost for you to shut down production. These structures were set up to make it economically viable to have these types of installations shut down in extreme events and function as "virtual power plants" (remember, lowering base load is physically and economically equivalent to providing additional generation.)
So far, this kind of makes sense. But unfortunately the same framework can also be applied to cryptocurrency operations, where it really does not make intuitive sense. Largely, IMO, because Bitcoin is so piggish for energy for so little societal value to start with.
It seems you'd be eligible for "quick reserve" if you could turn on or off >1MW of response within one minute. Ideal for batteries. Includes a "standby" fee paid hourly to cover having the system "armed".
(It seems unlikely that either the bitcoin operation or their electricity meter could manage sub-minute response times to changes in prices alone? I'm not exactly sure how metering and payment works at grid level and how granular it is)
The last couple years of evidence suggests that keeping the grid up requires a certain amount of central planning. On one hand, the frequency must remain relatively stable, globally. On the other, consumers don't want to deal with every fluctuation of the price (as they found out when they were exposed to the spike prices during spring '21). On principle, Texas is going to make sure that the energy sector is taken care of financially, so we end up in the situation we're in: Advertise the grid as market-purely as you can, engage in just enough planning to keep it up and the money flowing.
The gap between actual unfettered market forces and what gets implemented in American capitalism is where the grift happens. IE, ostensibly set up a free market to satisfy the ideologues but make sure there are carveout deals so cronyism has room to hand out favors.
You are missing something. That like all neoliberal idiots who claim to use "dur markets" as a catch all solution, they are dishonest bad faith actors looking to filter money and power to their friends, not make anything better for anyone. I imagine you'd find quite easily the tax payer money is filtered to companies they own or are friends of.
This is a pretty common scam among neoliberals that I don't know how it's still a mystery to people. "Dur freedum markets good!" or whatever populist lies to get elected then crank up subsidies to your friends. A tale as old as time.
Right up there with "defund state institutions and then point to their dilapidated state as evidence of their inherent failure". Nhs in the uk for an easy example.
Anytime government assets go to private hands there’s always some back room deals going on. Though it strange seeing neoliberal used when it’s usually the conservatives pushing this agenda in the US, that’s what it’s called.
Consider the payment as the cost of maintaining demand during periods where you don’t want it.
It's like a factory that can only produce 100 widgets each week, nothing more or less. Ideally you want to always sell 100 widgets each week (supply = demand). You could build a smaller factor that only makes 60 widgets, but the cost per widget would be 50% higher and at market rates you can't make enough money to justify the investment.
So what you do is build the 100 widget factory and you sign up a customer who will always buy 40 widgets each week, and the remaining 60 widgets you sell to smaller customers.
If suddenly the demand from smaller customers hits 90 widgets one week, you don't want to just cut off the 40 widget customer and say "tough shit", because they may not come back and you're stuck with 40 widgets each week you can't sell.
So you pay them money in exchange for accepting a lower supply of widgets that week.
Even with the payments, net-net you’re better off because during the 50 weeks per year when smaller customers only buy 60 widgets, overall your set up is more efficient.
“If suddenly the demand from smaller customers hits 90 widgets one week.”
Demand and price are linked. If you’re selling 40 units a week at 10$ and demand increase to 90 units @ 10$ that doesn’t force you to sell at 10$, you can spike prices to 50$ and suddenly people aren’t trying to buy 90 units.
There’s no denying involved in setting prices higher.
Electrify customers pay a premium to have a fixed rate. Customers swap to market rates because they can save a little money on average and significantly more if they delay use to cheaper periods. Such as plugging in an EV when you get home but only charging it from 12pm to 4am or whatever.
If prices were perfectly liquid and symmetrical, sure. Unfortunately they're not and the system is pretty complex. There's a bunch of different ways to purchase energy and not all of them are sensitive to realtime price.
Establishing a separate mechanism to compensate "virtual" generation (via load reduction) works no matter what pricing structure I use for my typical energy purchases.
I have a friend who works in the energy industry specifically targeting power grid management.
It is far easier for power companies to manage power loss for things with consistent power usage (low variance) than high variance / inconsistent power loads.
Businesses tend to be very consistent, even if their power draw is high, like manufacturing or hospitals etc.
Residential power tends to be more variant and harder to fine tune for because it can spike quite suddenly in unexpected ways and tends to add more base load over time.
Therefore, it’d actually make more sense for power companies to buy people homes in other states if lowering base load is a concern, since residential is where all the major issues are for load balancing, no?
> it’d actually make more sense for power companies to buy people homes in other states
No, because of scale. A large factory is one entity to deal with. Moving just one out of state is possible, but meaningless as even though houses are significant overall you need to deal with many houses before an actual difference is made, while if you can deal with a factory you can make a large difference for the same amount of effort.
A factory/hospital is also easier because they probably have a backup plan. if there is any possibility that the power will go out they are likely to have made backup plans. You are overall cheaper than their backup plans, but you can probably make them a deal where they run their backup plan instead of connecting to you. Since they already have the generator it isn't a problem for them to use their generator on your busy days, and so a small discount makes it easy to work with the factory than a home owner who is probably thinking about friends and family they are moving away from.
The power company has a list of who these deals are with and the priority order. I know of one factory with a coal boiler from the 1800s, and a generator from then 1920s - the whole is very inefficient and takes a full day to start up, but the power company makes it worth while to keep everything operational because every 5 years they can power it on and supply the whole town (at 5x the normal cost of power from the plants they run all the time). Meanwhile there is a store near my parents that is running their generator every hot day - a modern diesel generator when sized properly is not a lot more expensive than grid power so the store doesn't need a big incentive to use it instead of grid power.
Of course all of the above is for exceptions. Where I live now we have built far more wind than needed most of the time, and as a result 80% of our power is renewable. There are very few days when backups are even needed.
Not yet anyway. While batteries are interesting, they do start on fire once in a while. We think with correct engineering that risk can be mitigated, but we shouldn't roll things out too fast just in case it really can't.
I kind of wonder why there has been so much push for consumer solar / battery over neighborhood solar / battery projects. At least in Texas, there is so much empty land, it seems like it would be more effective to 'imminent domain' some land or leverage existing right-of-ways for solar array + battery storage, rather than putting the burden on individual homeowners to purchase what is effectively community infrastructure (if we were allowed to sell power back to the grid).
I was talking utility level storage. My lens is that utility/industrial level solar + storage is where most of the action is. The retail stuff is good for construction and local jobs and the feel good homeowner play.
You could certainly make an argument that zoning needs to be "power neutral": can't zone any houses or businesses without zoning an equivalent power plant. Very SimCity.
Maybe they can just price electricity at different tiers of use. Or home vs business rates. Charge crypto farms more, especially if the grid is struggling.
Texas’ strategy is to encourage additional growth in the crypto mining sector because ostensibly they use a lot of power during off-peak days/hours which supports capital payback but also is flexible enough to turn off their load when the grid production is over stressed, so they theoretically won’t contribute to blackouts.
Not sure if this thinking is fully correct, but on its face it’s at minimum not completely absurd.
Also I think some of the Texas leadership is financially or emotionally invested in cryptocurrency.
Texas would never do anything that makes them appear 'anti-business' though. It goes against the entire political ethos of the folks in charge down there.
Texas needs a capacity market, where generators are paid based on their must run status. They choose not to previously because of politics (prioritizing low cost over resiliency). The PUC is working to fix this ("performance credit mechanism").
There is. Pricing is split mostly along residential vs. commercial vs. industrial although there’s a few more layers of discrimination based on usage patterns and “power factor” (reactive vs capacitive load).
Is it? There’s not nearly enough information to tell.
Austin Energy appears to charge about 10 cents/kWh (interestingly, it’s comparable across all service classes if I read the tariff sheet right). They pay up to $80/kW saved on average (across all events, I think) [0], I think annually. The webpage is vague. So Austin Energy is effectively paying $80/kW/year of capacity available on 10 minutes notice.
1 kW for a whole year is 8766 kWh, which would cost about $876. And you need to actually be using that kW to resell it as average demand response, so this program is about a 10% discount for being willing to shut down on 10 minutes notice. Or alternatively, you get 10% off in exchange for reducing your SLA a bit :)
Hate bitcoin miners all you like, but the actual payment seems quite reasonable.
It's called demand management / demand response / frequency response. I think that line sounds like a bit of click bait as there isn't much context around it.
I would imagine that the crypto operations also pays a lot of money for generation services - so knowing how much it purchases for electricity vs how much it conserves would add a lot of context. Stating that they get millions (loose numbers) from DM/DR programs is pretty soft reporting and they are providing a grid stabilizing service.
The argument that retail consumers can't get money from DR programs i'm not sure is accurate though don't know what ERCOT currently offers for residential consumers. I know of services that allow consumers to cash in through smart thermostats etc (OhmConnect). Also its a lot cheaper to get a couple large consumers to reduce their usage then aggregating over a large group of houses.
Now if you are trying to argue that this use case for the electricity is wasteful thats another argument or that Texas handling of the grid has been challenged especially the natural gas fiasco - also another argument.
You joke but in August the biggest Bitcoin mine in North America got paid 3.5x more by the utility to turn their rigs off than they made in actual Bitcoin mined -- and they say openly that collecting credits is core to their strategy.
You have to make a creditable threat first. My guess is even though bit being paid not to mine bitcoin is where the money is, they would still lose money overall if they didn't mine bitcoin at the time when they were not paid to not use power.
That is you need to buy servers and keep them functional in order to get the subsidy. The subsidy isn't enough pay for the servers on its own. Probably bitcoin itself doesn't pay enough for the servers/power/space it needs anymore, though that requires analysis that I can't perform.
The payments are described as "credits" which I assume means they only offset future power purchases; ERCOT doesn't actually give you cash. So you do have to have some sort of machine that converts power into money to take advantage of it.
Clearly I need to start Big Resistor Inc. It's just a big connection across the grid that wastes megawatts of energy, but I can get paid for turning it off.
Only if your threat to turn it on is realistic. That is you have to be willing to buy at market rates metawatts of energy when they don't feel like paying you. If they think you are doing this - that is not producing value with those metawatts you buy when you buy they will call your bluff: not pay you and thus force you to lose $$$ proving you are serious. I think their pockets are bigger than yours and so it won't work out.
I am curious what it takes to get this sweet deal. Surely anyone can join in the mining and get paid to do nothing on the wonky Texas grid and when you can run - deliver nothing of positive value to society.
Does one need a minimum number of rigs? Maybe a permit? Just apply to the utility?
I’d rather be paid than volunteer to sit around in the dark, sweating like a chump.
> (1) the facility requires a total load of more than 75 megawatts; and
Then I register with ERCOT... and profit. They seem to have passed a few bothersome "bills" to thwart our attempts at being a giant resistor though. Also, so they don't seem to specify any efficiency rating for the whole endeavor. Perhaps I can literally install a giant power resistor + a few GPUs, claim 75 MW, turn it all off and then head to the bank?
I want to buy up all of the old readily available GPUs. No need to fight over new latest gen GPUs to actually produce coins. You just need equipment that looks like you can do mining. Then, voluntarily not mine anything so the power company pays you. That is the actual business model to not ever mine anything.
I grew up in Texas. I honestly think the main problem with the politics there is that they have never had to deal with limited resources, basically ever. Food, water, fuel, land, education, basically everything a society could want was bountiful there. In my lifetime however, that has changed in certain areas.
One of the reasons why I'm so obsessed with transportation alternatives is that I came of age as Austin went from an arguably perfect highway capacity, then suddenly tipped into an unfixable accelerating traffic nightmare. Watching a finite resource (highway capacity) suddenly cross a depletion threshold, and cascade out of control really effected me. Once it happens, nothing can really be done about it except at enormous cost.
We are now seeing the same happening with power capacity. We will soon see it with water as the Ogallala Aquifer disappears.
The type of politically palatable libertarianism that thrives in most of Texas, require effectively unlimited access to resources.
Don't worry, Texas is just helping the crypto miners rather than their citizens again. "The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) paid a bitcoin miner $31.7 million in energy credits in August to not mine bitcoin. During the August heat wave, ERCOT issued eight calls for voluntary energy conservation. People were asked to adjust home thermostats or delay doing laundry during the energy call."
>“His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbours sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counselled one and all, and everyone said “Amen.”
“His specialty was crypto, and he made a good thing out of not mining any. The government paid him well for every coin of crypto he did not mine. The more crypto he did not mine, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new servers to increase the amount of crypto he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not mining crypto. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend cable ties, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the admin would not be done. He invested in datacenters wisely and soon was not mining more crypto than any other man in the county. Neighbours sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counselled one and all, and everyone said “KK.”
Unfortunately not how it works. The reason that Texas is paying miners to load shed is because they are being paid to supply a constant load to the grid. They shut down in order to dump capacity into the grid because that is less expensive than attempting to bring new capacity online to meet demand and then later bring that capacity back down when it is no longer needed. Because of the way miners can ramp up and down their loads systems can be set up to smooth out extreme spikes in electrical demand.
These miners have no choice but to shut down because ERCOT can also remotely kill their ability to consume the load. Part of the payments they get are because of the service being provided to the grid and also to encourage miners to continue operating in good faith by volunteering to load shed and work with grid operators.
The story is even more complex when you throw in things like land being bought to the sum of 240 million for these miners to operate on and locals in areas like this seem excited for the job opportunity so I have to believe good portions of that 34 million are making its way right back into the local economy of central Texas.
The reason Bitcoin mining works and not your space heater is because of the incentive structures built into the proof of work system within Bitcoin.
I think this is worth digging into deeper and figuring out how we can objectively measure if this is successful or not. I think there is a legitimate counter argument to make that without mining actually, Texas would have had a full grid blackout this summer.
I also have the somewhat controversial opinion that things like bitcoin are useful because they create static but easy to shed demand.
So to explain what I mean by that in depth - the economic losses from shutdown are limited to production losses during the shutdown, and there is no loss of inventory, or other secondary losses like process startup and shutdown for a refinery, semiconductor fab, or other kinds of manufacturing which product a physical good.
This static load absorbs some of the excess generation from wind and solar, thereby keeping the spot price in the grid high enough that thermal generation is still cost effective to build and operate.
Now, that all said, I dont think we should be paying them to shut down, they should just be disconnected wholesale from the grid during periods of ultra high demand as a condition of their interconnection to it. That said, we have programs designed to offset economic losses from disconnection from the grid during high use periods, and the bitcoin plants are just using that existing mechanism - I have mixed feelings about it, but I dont think its all bad.
Could Texas return to Integrated utilities, and Rate of Return based pricing? sure, but that'd be up to the legislature to deal with.
I think the current system surprisingly (even to me) works well, I think building in market incentives is probably easier than trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
In that vein, I’m more interested in what Crusoe Energy is doing.
They started out with Bitcoin mining at “energy island” locations. Now they are setting up AI data centres at such sites.
Correct me if I am wrong but I think you mean "And then find out you're mining Bitcoin" but I am not sure. Assuming that is what you meant ERCOT is able to remotely monitor the load and verify if they are shedding load or not. The miners just sort of exist on the grid and it gives ERCOT the ability to control inbound and outbound capacity which is how I think they are able to smooth out the electrical demands or whatever. It is also possible that ERCOT knows granular details about the load since these miners (known as an ASIC) consume a set amount of power from the wall. But they don't need that much detail, they only need to see the total load from the miners come down in order to know that miners are doing as they should.
It is all really new stuff to me but interesting. I think a lot of negative attention takes the light because the state of Texas is a political dumpster fire and I would be incredibly suspicious of anything the state tries to do, especially when it comes to something adjacent to a trendy industry that has made big news for scams after scams lately. But from what I am able to gather so far, there might actually be something here.
I do agree with one commenter in that I am not entirely sure its needed to provide payment to these guys, but maybe they are not able to be profitable with mining and selling Bitcoin alone, or need to hedge against the volatility of the price and payments help with both of those things.
>The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) paid a bitcoin miner $31.7 million in energy credits
Politicians are utterly useless. They all herded to the crypto grift frenzy as if this was going to do anything for the local economy. Wonder how it's turning out? The 2021 fad has subsided, now they are paying customers to mine coins? Beyond stupid.
Step 1: get in power.
Step 2: make government smaller by dismantling systems made to protect the public.
Step 3: grift.
Step 4: "See, governments are all grifters! Never vote for people who ask for bigger governments."
Step 5: goto step 1
Did they all get in on the crypto grift frenzy? I know in Canada there's a certain political slant (up to and including the leader of our official opposition who spoke highly of bitcoin) that seemed more enamored with it than the rest.
It sounds like they're dancing around what may be a social issue; ERCOT sent an email asking people to "conserve", within 30 minutes they saw a negative impact. Is it possible some recipients saw the email and took the complete opposite action?
It wouldn't surprise me if after an email telling them to lower their consumption, consumers would anticipate the worst and instead decide to recharge any electrical appliances reliant on batteries (Power banks, EVs, etc...) "just in case".
Given the previous grid crash this is a rational reaction.
While may be cathartic to muse how certain political ideologies tend to do the exact opposite when asked to conserve, Texans' don't trust the grid and they have valid reasons to not trust it.
if I was looking at potential power cut during a heat wave in my home, I would probably lower my AC a few degrees, and if your honest, most of you would too..
I do make my house a few degrees colder and charge batteries every time I get an emergency message from ERCOT this summer. Part of it is simply tragedy of the commons - I'm 10^-6% of the regional grid usage and have little individual effect on the grid, but will suffer more if I don't get mine while I can. Think about whether you want to discourage honesty before you downvote. I've made my house extra well insulated with efficient zoned AC units otherwise, so I'm not an energy abuser in general.
I have an rational distrust of ERCOT's grid management given my experience of freezing for a week in 2021. What's more the current situation is entirely preventable(who could predict summer in TX would be hot?!) so I rebel at suffering to compensate for ERCOT's negligence and corruption.
They don't just send emails, they also send texts. Given that this is the 7th time they've done this in the past ~2 weeks, if anything I would expect people to be more likely to ignore the messages now, since (from the perspective of residents) nothing obviously bad happened the other 6 times.
The difference is that this was the first time that they followed up the first message with a second one when reserves became critically low and the frequency started dropping. But by the time I saw the second message, it was obvious from their dashboards that the situation was well on its way to being resolved, so I'm doubtful the second message had much affect either way.
I wouldn't doubt that at all. During covid it became clear to me that there is a large part of the population that does the opposite of what any authority figure tells them regardless of how much sense it makes, just to be spiteful & show how 'uncontrolled' they are.
ERCOT is not "the power company". They're the marketplace where many power companies exchange. And they probably do know a bit of what happened but aren't going to share preliminary information until deeper analysis is complete.
The power marketplace company should actually have better information on questions like “did a powerplant selling into the market go offline” than anyone except the plant operator, and should have more information about the impact than anyone.
It depends on how they're joined to the "grid" - if a company running multiple plants is providing 10 GW and later is providing 9900 MW did a plant go offline? Did clouds obscure solar? Did the wind die down?
And we don't know if they do or don't have that information, they haven't said either way. So its a bit early to complain about them not knowing something when we don't know if they know or not.
If they truly don't know, then that's a problem. If they do know but are waiting to release information until they know all the facts, that's probably fine.
On a re-read, the article does mention that the speculation of power plant failure is coming from outsiders on Twitter, so we don’t know whether the observability is there or not
From how the headline was worded, I was expecting an interesting answer explaining the 'why' but the article is focused on grid stability with the headline's answer being "dunno, maybe because it was hot" -- except the article implies this was not a single hot day but part of a larger trend.
That is what I thought. IF a power plant went offline, wouldn't they know it? Aren't they measuring all of their production, so they could pinpoint what plant dropped?
the more I read about ERCOT, the texas energy council, the more im convinced its a grift that wasnt designed to survive the test of climate change.
ERCOT reform was announced by Governor Abbott in 2021, but that same reform was also penned in a nearly 400 page report that was completely ignored during ERCOT's 2011 failure.
This is politics in a nutshell. People keep voting for the same politicians so they keep the same problems. Power infrastructure is poor? Keep voting for the same people that made it that way. Lots of violent crime in your city? Keep voting for the people that release criminals back into society immediately.
Politics is so binary and broken in this country that we are just making fixable issues into permanent hardships.
This is a Dem and Rep problem and more importantly the end result of a 2 party system.
I understand your point, but if I let the $OTHER party get control, they will work against my beliefs on Abortion and Guns, which are the only 2 beliefs that the parties have together taught me matters...
You are 100% correct. Thats what we are missing.
Additional parties that perhaps hold party A's thoughts on Abortion and Guns but maybe share party B's thoughts on immigration or health care or whatever. The country really needs choice.
I'm a swing voter, I vote both R and D. To the best of my knowledge I have never met another one in real life. I know they do exist though. I find myself voting one party at the state level and another at the federal level. Both parties have stances I agree and disagree with. I would love a party that does the same.
If you over-simplify, stereotype and demean people who disagree with you, you're part of the problem.
Honestly if it was that simple, then maybe we should just say no more killing babies and let the hunters shoot their deer and otherwise move forward with the rest of the Democratic party's platform.
I live in a red state whose natural environment has been devastated by Republican policies for over a century. What people see here today is a remnant of primordial old-growth wilderness. But they think it's natural and how it's always been. Similarly to the way that austerity drives struggle and suffering for working class families, but they continue voting conservative against their own self-interest. The worse it gets, the more they vote Republican. Like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown right as he is about to kick it.
Democrats have been pushing for sustainability and a national rollout of renewable energy since at least the 1960s, definitely before the Earth First! movement of the 1980s, and probably all the way back to the strengthening of national parks by Teddy Roosevelt during the Progressive Era around 1900. It's odd to imagine a Republican as an environmentalist today, but there used to be many. That helps us to understand how the parties flipped due to stuff like Nixon's Southern Strategy.
We can blame Democrats for urban sprawl, high state sales tax, red tape/overregulation, basic hypocrisy in not living sustainably at an individual level and subscribing to neoliberalism like Republicans. But the economic and environmental problems we face today are mostly a result of decades of anti-sustainability legislation and subsidies for fossil fuel companies by Republicans. To say otherwise is revisionist history and not the academic view IMHO.
With the 100 year storms hitting the south every 2-10 years now, the environmental bill is coming due. It's all but certain that some number of southern states will flip blue. It will be interesting to see if that improves their infrastructure, or if it's too late.
But I do agree with you about the dysfunction. When the Boomers pass, I wonder if the parties will flip again and introduce a whole new set of wedge issues to argue about incessantly as the world burns.
That's exactly my point though. It's only a fallacy because of your particular view on certain topics. For some people it's guns and abortion, for you it's the environment.
Imagine the world from the point of view of some one that truly believes that abortion is the murder of little children. I really mean it, just for 30 seconds.
We all have these core issues that we hold most dear and assume others must as well. Many people care far more about social issues than the environment or taxation or whatever their 'it' is.
Having only 2 parties forces us to choose the party that best represents our 'it' but to also vote for the myriad of other policies we may disagree with. We very much dislike the other party though because they have the opposite stance on our 'it'.
"It's all but certain that some number of southern states will flip blue" Florida is redder than ever. I encourage you to pause and reflect on the why of that. It's very much not because the voters are stupid, they have other 'its' that are important to them.
I'm afraid that this is something we'll have to agree to disagree on.
It's not really possible to write about this without sounding political, but the article covers a problem of political origin. So I'll do my best here to stay objective.
The left is fairly aligned today along a number of ideological lines. Basically all democrats want renewable energy, recycling, regulated natural monopolies instead of privatization, minimal social safety nets in the form of unemployment insurance and food stamps, universal healthcare, higher taxes on the wealthy, etc. It feels that scaremongering over taxation is a distraction from the fact that corporations and the wealthy have received multi-trillion dollar tax cuts since the Reagan Revolution and trickle-down economics, which created the national debt, many argue by design.
The right however is divided between libertarian ideals and religious fundamentalism. Jesus would be sad that children are caged at the border, while Christian nationalists call for tougher border enforcement. Rivers are being poisoned while rightwing think tanks like The Heritage Foundation call for more deregulation. People are struggling to make rent, much less pay their taxes, while roads and bridges crumble due to siphoning of the general fund to pay for continuous war in the Middle East and the bloating of the military industrial complex via IOUs to social security. Just on and on and on. There is so much cognitive dissonance within the Republican party that its voters must hold their noses while continuing to vote for it, simply to avoid the pain of voting for the other guys. There is no unified Republican vision to speak of today like there was under a statesman like Eisenhower. So the party turns to strongmen like the former president and Ron DeSantis in desperation, while the left and the rest of the world watch in confusion.
I feel that the projection of the right's frustrations onto the left is not based in fact or reason. Florida is redder than ever, as you said. But Florida is becoming uninsurable. My friend just moved there and narrowly escaped having his home destroyed because hurricane Idalia turned east at the last moment. Homosexuals didn't cause that, centuries of CO2 emissions from the industrial revolution and complete denial of that fact by the right did. But the news makes both of those stances sound fair and balanced.
One of the major things that Republicans struggle with is materiality (relevance and prioritization).
Without a natural environment, humanity can't survive. Bitcoin may use a lot of energy (that's dwarfed by manufacturing and transportation) yet look how much it's popped up in the comments as a factor in the blackouts. Corporate welfare and defense spending dwarf food stamp costs like SNAP for children, yet Republicans consistency target that for spending cuts. Wind and solar costs fell below coal and natural gas a decade ago, yet rightwing think tanks continue to spread propaganda that renewables are more expensive, that photovoltaic panels and fiberglass windmill blades are worse for the environment than burning radioactive coal.
Even wedge issues like abortion aren't what they seem. The left argues that personal choice and responsibility should not be overridden by government overreach. But that's a Republican sentiment. Democrats would normally argue for the protection of embryos, since they are a vulnerable segment of the population and have no advocate. Yet the parties are flipped on this, using it as a tool to rally their bases. So indirectly, I agree with you here.
Same with gun control. Democrats aren't demanding that the government take away our guns. That's Republican propaganda. But the left is arguing for banning or at the very least licensing assault weapons, just like how a truck driver should probably have a class A driver's license to operate a vehicle with such destructive potential. The key here is that this is all beside the point, since both sides are trying to protect children in schools. But the right is still in denial that their own children aren't at risk as long as guns aren't regulated.
I don't really know what to say about all of this. And thankfully nobody cares what I think. And also I'm always wrong, luckily. But I believe in my heart that the pandemic opened our eyes to reality. The chickens have come home to roost. Formerly academic problems are now at our doorstep. I can see that Biden has survived nearly unsurvivable trauma, so now he's woke. He is no hero to the left, but its hero Bernie Sanders couldn't be allowed by the establishment. Where is an empathetic leader on the right? Where is the conservative leader that will rise above generational trauma to lead us into prosperity? There isn't one. Because the right isn't doing the work to move through a healing and growth process. There's only projection, finger pointing, half-truths and ridiculous eventualities like a whole state's power grid going down so that a few guys at the top can dip their sticky fingers into the public's electric bill.
Thank you for the thoughtful response. For the most part you are correct. I do want to stress though that while I agree with you on many of the issues on a whole, I look at them from a slightly different perspective.
I'll use myself as an example. I live in Florida so I can identify with your friend and insurance. My political leanings have shifted as I have gotten older and had kids. I voted Dem religiously my entire life until the last midterm. I voted for Desantis even though on many issues I disagree with him. My 'it' to continue my theme from my prior post became social issues and more importantly how they affect my kids. I am very much against schools keeping secrets from parents and the sort of gender & race ideology that is encouraged in states like California [I expect to be massively down voted over this]. I have no issue with adults making whatever choices they want in life as consenting adults. Thus Desantis got my vote this round even though I disagree with him on many things, especially his use of government power to target political enemies like Disney (which has blown up in his face). I don't think Desantis is a good candidate for federal power and will vote for Biden again. I will probably vote Desantis again on the state level for the same reason, local control of schools and social issues that in my mind could affect my kids.
You could argue that my concerns are unfounded or pale in comparison to the dangers of climate change. Right now though they are my main concern and I will hold my nose and vote on them. I agree climate change is an issue, I just don't see it as being immediately solvable. Third world countries are going to continue to burn coal and more of it as they seek to expand their economy. I don't see how we can ask them not to while we sit here in the first world and enjoy the benefits of decades of doing just that.
As far as assault rifles, the right sees them as insurance against government coming into homes and dictating to them how they should live their lives. Whether we agree or not, that is their world view or at least some of them. This was compounded when we watched police in other countries assault people in the pandemic over mask wearing. A family member of mine who is highly intelligent and manages billions of $ has what can essentially be called an arsenal for this reason.
Abortion for many is not so much an issue of personal choice but of the wholesale murder of kids. I think you would agree that it should not be a parents choice to kill a 4 year old, just extrapolate to a fetus and that's how they feel. Again, this is their belief and it understandably colors their world view. I don't share this belief but I get it.
Many white republicans see the changes in other countries like race being taken into account in prison sentencing and school admission and see how this affects their kids long term. The mayor of new york city, a democrat just said that all of the immigrants being sent to NYC could be the end of it. Republicans in TX and border states have dealt with this for many years so you can understand how it colors their opinion.
I'm pretty much with you on the military industrial complex part except I view it as a jobs program. We provide work to people who otherwise may not find meaningful employment as well as providing hundreds of thousands of middle class jobs to the engineers that build our weapon systems and the supporting software. If we cut our military spend by half tomorrow, where would all of those jobs go?
Democrats frame violent crime often as a gun issue but so many of the weapons used in shootings in cities like Chicago are illegal weapons. Republicans see these cities and their crime rates as proof that being lax on enforcement and punishment leads to violence. SF is a great example of this as people leave and businesses close up due to rampant theft and safety concerns.
I generally try and put myself in other peoples shoes to understand where they are coming from. I'll vote Biden because I think he is doing a good job on the federal level I don't see any decent candidates of the caliber of McCain or Romney on the Republican side. I'll also try and vote for mixed government in congress as preventing 1 party from having full power prevents the most extreme of either parties ideas being pushed through. Real change requires compromise from both. I'll vote for Republicans on the state level as right now my 'it' requires it.
I am willing to change though as my 'it' changes and as my kids get older, my voting will probably continue to evolve. Everyone has a reason why they vote how they do though, their core issue is just different from yours or mine. I think I may be a little different in that my core issue actually changes. I think for most they just vote how they have always voted and their core issues remain the same.
One thing I very much don't like is how vindictive politics has become in the last decade or so. People hate the other side to the point of violence [left and right]. I cannot condone that. I also see what happened on Jan. 6 as an abomination which is another reason that I will not vote R at the federal level unless the candidate utterly condemns it and the person in power when it happened.
Hey fair enough. For what it's worth, I agree with much of what you're saying as well.
Having grown up in a red state and having conservative leanings around self-reliance, even though at a national level I prefer some liberal bureaucracy to keep the system running, because that's beyond me. If the system worked as the founding fathers intended, we'd be able to rely on republican representation to take care of business for us so that we wouldn't have to be as personally involved democratically. The loss of that basic trust and civil discourse really irks me. Especially in recent years, as you said.
I don't have kids, but I have watched my more political friends on social media cool their jets a little since January 6, I think due to family pressure. It seems to be slowly dawning on them that the problems we're facing transcend politics. None of us want to leave future generations saddled with unplayable debts and environmental collapse. But sadly there's not much we can do about that in the short term. So we'll probably have to work through these wedge issues one by one and put it all on the table to reach some sort of consensus or compromise through political horse trading. And that's not a bad thing.
I keep writing and deleting this paragraph, so I think I'll just leave it at that. Thank you as well for responding in depth. I wish I could leave you with the last word, but didn't want to leave you hanging!
This is the first I've seen data on high demand growth this summer (I live in Texas and try to follow these issues).
> The power grid has seen overall demand grow 7% this summer, after two decades of predictable 1% per year growth, and 10 preliminary demand records since late June. [1]
What's stopping power companies from ramping up energy production? They know in advance there will be problems. What stopping them from just producing more? I realize there are some peculiarities of the Texas grid, but this is obviously a problem beyond Texas, as California and east coast has blackouts as well. I'm asking about all these cases.
I imagine maybe this requires some additional infrastructure that simply doesn't exist. If so, what's the barrier to building this infrastructure?
When you're already running at full tilt, how are you going to ramp up energy production? You then need to build more.
Building and connecting takes time. Texas has added several state's worth of energy to the grid in the past few years. The peak hit at the 2021 winter storm was 76GW, far higher than any normal time historically. This summer, just two years later, Texas is going >85GW of power demand every day.
For comparison, New York's projected peak demand is only 32GW for this summer. So Texas' demand grew by an additional 1/3 of New York's entire demand in just 2 years. That's a massive amount of growth!
The demand is there, the building is there, but if you overbuild you can get screwed very hard, so the power companies have (very complex, mind you) models that they use to determine if a plant will make sense to bring online.
Those models may have been wrong, or based on assumptions about temperatures that turned out incorrect.
That's not a capacity issue though, that's your local delivery company having issues. Delivery companies pretty much are still the older style highly regulated utilities. Its an entirely different problem with different incentives than what the above posters were talking about.
Building even 100GW of additional capacity in the state or additional transmission capacity for solar out in the middle of nowhere won't solve the problems your neighbors are facing. Complaining about ERCOT isn't solving the problem, its not ERCOT's role to handle that section. Hold your local delivery provider responsible.
I'd be interested in knowing who that delivery company is if you wouldn't mind sharing.
High growth in demand due to increasing temperatures. This summer is likely exceptional, due to El Nino, but it won't be the last one, and the base temperature will continue to rise due to climate change.
So this was foreseeable, but unforeseen because they didn't wish to. And it will continue to happen, and worse.
They're already incentivized to do this because the price varies with demand. Providers that can vary their output (at least some natural gas and coal sources) already do this on a daily basis, which you can see here: https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/fuelmix
The overnight low price is typically $20-$30/MWh. Yesterday during the shortage the price peaked at $5000/MWh, which I suspect might be an upper limit.
I live in Texas and we’ve been dancing on the edge of energy availability for weeks now. If you glance at ERCOT’s public graphs that estimate energy supply and demand, every evening we’re barely eeking by. From what I’ve heard, this should be improving daily as temperatures ease, but I guess not. Surprising that we had an emergency episode in September rather than two weeks ago.
If Texas can’t supply enough energy in the summer, I have no hope for what our future winters will look like.
I feel like TX is doing more to push for energy independence than any other single organization in the country. the grid incompetence, and governments unwillingness to resolve, is the best driver for household battery and solar I can this of.
I don't live in TX, but if I didn't have 1day battery storage, coupled with solar capability to charge that battery to full in a single day, with a generator as backup, every ounce of effort would be going to that.
While that would work well in summer, and this current issue, the outlook isn’t so good for Texas winters. I recently spoke with another Texan who has had solar + batteries for a couple years.
Apparently, in our area, winters are so cloudy that their solar panels (which cover 100% of energy usage in summer) don’t cover but 20% of their usage in the winter.
No reasonable amount of batteries can ward off grid concerns with those inefficiencies.
I didn’t live here in previous years, but I think it’s abnormal that multiple days in a week demand is estimated to be above supply.
And yes, it’s most efficient to keep supply and demand close. But based on this article and our recent trends, it seems like there’s some trouble / concern with unlocking the extra energy needed to supply everyone lately.
As a Texan, I think whats going on in Texas, perhaps controversially is what happens when you have an over reliance on solar and wind as primary power sources. Even in Texas (where wind is basically ever-present) there are times when the wind does not blow.
I think wind and solar are great, and we should build more, but you also need a sizable amount of thermal generation (preferably nuclear) to provide for base load.
I dont think thermal can be replaced readily with gas turbine, battery, pumped storage, or other forms of rapid spin up equipment.
I have the somewhat controversial opinion that things like bitcoin are useful because they create static demand, and by doing so make the excess generation from wind and solar economical, thereby keeping the spot price in the grid high enough that thermal generation is still cost effective to build and operate - I dont think we should be paying them to shut down, they should just be disconnected wholesale from the grid during periods of ultra high demand as a condition of their interconnection to it.
The real issue in texas is not enough thermal generation capacity - I'd prefer it be nuclear, but right now its gas, and we dont have enough based on the states growth.
> The call came, the group said, as heat drove energy demand up and wind power was forecasted to be low.
Renewable energy is not reliable or stable enough to be as large of a share of the power grid as it already is. ERCOT is running into this first because it’s a smaller grid and has less margin for error, but the other two US grids are going to have the same problem in time.
So based on that[1], it looks like the issue is that solar and wind capacity is forecasted to dip right around the time demand peaks? And there's basically no battery storage available (4,835 MW of maximum storage output vs the 61,549 MW maximum combined output for wind+solar)?
Do you have any supporting evidence for that? becuase i have seen EV's power entire homes when the power is cut, which kind of sounds like the opposite. I have also seen most 'smart' chargers take demand into account when charging up your car.
Massive solar deployment is a great clean energy source to add to the existing plants. However, it isn't a solid baseline source without storage/batteries.
This is where EVs can help if they have V2G aka bidirectional charging capabilities.
Nuclear will take years if not decades to solve the problems but solar can be deployed in months or a year with the right incentives.
EVs might become a large part of the grid's energy storage, smoothing out these conditions of solar/wind shortages.
If ERCOT is paying bitcoin miners to not mine, I don't see why they wouldn't be willing to pay EV owners for some storage capacity and cooperative charge scheduling.
Unpopular opinion (and so strange that a red state like Texas did it this way), but: Texas is far too dependent on wind power, fossil fuel plants (even natural gas!) being shut down at the behest of the federal govt, and definitely not enough nuclear, although those can take quite a few years to come online.
Wait, so instead of charging their crypto mining customers more, they are paying them not to mine? WTF? You have to love their "free market" energy grid /s
There's a lot of misunderstanding in the comments so far regarding bitcoin mining incentives. I urge you to read this thread describing the split-second load-shedding response time from the POV of one of these miners:
It also goes into the other mechanism by which they make money (being natural sellers of future energy demand contracts during times of high demand). This mechanism is similar to how other commodity markets operate with producers, consumers with steady future demand, and consumers with unpredictable short-term demand.
Our energy grids need to keep an equal demand/production at all times, and on-demand load-shedding is a valuable part of this equation. The bitcoin miners are providing a service to ERCOT and being paid for it. If there were a more "productive" source of on-demand energy usage, then it will replace the bitcoin miners, this is how markets work (of which both energy production/consumption and capitalism in general are).
This is the reality of how the texas energy grid works at present. The bitcoin miners, for lack of a (subjectively) "better" option, are filling the two needs of elastic load-shedding and predictable future demand. The first is very hard to fill, the latter can probably be fulfilled more productively with steady demand from other industries (factories, data centers, other things that run 24h per day).
One more edit: this whole equation changes COMPLETELY if we have the ability to store energy production in times of low demand to be used in future times of high demand (batteries). We don't currently have this at any sort of reasonably useful scale, we need this, and the current "market" everyone is upset about is a bandaid on top of the lack of decent storage options. For the climate folks, the anti-bitcoin folks, whoever disagrees with what I've said here: Fix the storage issue and everything gets magically better. Good luck, it's a very hard problem with very nasty environmental impacts, I'm rooting for you.
Alternatively, a better option: as a human need, maybe energy production shouldn’t _strictly_ follow market incentives and shouldn’t be _solely_ governed by supply/demand dynamics
Totally agree! But this isn't the reality we live in today and you have proposed a potentially better option with no ideas on how to achieve it. What you need to focus on is how we can grow a better grid while achieving prepaid usage levels, guaranteed usage levels, and on-demand response. These factors are what lead to a more efficient, more climate friendly, more better etc etc grid.
Saying they're "providing a service" by turning off in peak times is kind of a ridiculous phrasing. Normal consumers in normal markets don't buy at peak because peak pricing is quite expensive. Flipping the equation to paying people to not buy something and calling it a service is outrageous. It exposes the grid as something that literally cannot work on free market principles. People are right to be outraged.
This just isn't how the grid works. Texas has added more than double the amount of renewable energy than any other state grid in the last two years. These investments introduce variable production and require on-demand response to keep the demand/consumption balance steady. Normal / residential consumers do not have a steady demand, don't prepay power usage, and don't guarantee future power usage. All of these factors are what make industrial demand response valuable and necessary for the modernizing, increasingly-renewable based, power grid. ERCOT isn't perfect, I think there are areas for vast improvement, but I think your comment is a little uninformed as to how the grid currently works and will be working in the future as we increase renewable production.
I get how the grid works. You don't get the market failure.
In a normal market, consumers aren't service providers unless they happen to also sell something separate from what they're buying. They're using a service. Sellers ostensibly take a risk that demand won't be sufficient.
With the grid, that's unacceptable. So there's an absurd solution of paying customers to influence their buying behavior, and even calling them 'service providers'. In a normal market, you charge more or less to steer consumer behavior, like what they do for human customers.
In this 'market', the government is providing much of the capital and the businesses are not taking on all of the risk. And some 'customers' are necessary to make the product work.
This is not an appropriate scenario for a free market. It's actually impossible for it to function as a free market.
According to my Google foo, around 1000 people per day have been moving to Texas in the last three years alone. Put anywhere between a half million to three quarters of a million additional people on the power grid in a three year span and the grid is bound to have issues.
Also, really like how the majority of the comments sound like Reddit /r/politics's far left, adult man child, ignorant insights.
I actually think it’s the only somewhat good thing about Texas’ grid. What better way to ensure Island configuration works than running that mode all the time?
Texas is massive, bigger than many countries and bigger than several nearby states put together. Most forms of geographic and other kinds of risk could be smoothed over with sheer scale. We have massive energy production resources including not just oil and natural gas, but way more than our fair share of nuclear, wind, and solar. Most likely we'd be helping other states much more often than they help us. The TX grid is a mess due to sheer mismanagement and poor regulation, not so much being disconnected from our neighbors. It's maddening how little it would take to do better, like just better weatherizing the nuke plants and the gas pipes feeding natural gas generation so it doesn't go down when there's a worse than average freeze.
A US wide grid failure can’t cascade into Texas if Texas is not connected. Most national grids have plans to run areaa in island mode in case of catastrophic failure, but who knows how well that would work.
Before the blockchain hate gets too intense just wanted to remind that Bitcoin is the odd one out using a proof-of-work algorithm. Pretty much every other project uses a security technique that is light on power-consumption.
If you had lived through the last blackout and still lived in Texas, then absolutely yes it’s newsworthy. We want to grade our government accurately. Almost having a collapse again is a bad mark on the test score.
Yes, lets keep news coverage focused only on disasters after they've happened.
Let's keep our heads down in the sand when the cracks are starting to show and when there still might be time to adapt to what's going on before the disaster strikes.
Nothing happened, so nothing to see here. Everything is working perfectly, move along.
... Does something need to be an abject disaster in order to be newsworthy? This is so strange to me as a position.
In case you were asking this in good faith: Yeah, it is, for a buncha reasons. I'll theorycraft a few from my uneducated position:
1) There was a public mass email sent out, but followup wasn't forthcoming, so people might want to know what happened. People often turn to the news for this function.
b) There was grid failure that resulted in deaths because it got too cold out a while back, so people might want to know if it's likely to happen again, once more making the news about the conditions involved relevant, because it wasn't too cold this time.
iii) Some people rely on electricity to stay alive in a very-direct, medical sense, and might be so interested enough in the power grid's disposition to be concerned if someone at ERCOT farts out of turn.
Also, yes, the news routinely reports on things that almost happened. I don't even own cable TV and I know that.
Regional blackouts are kinda common in Texas. The article briefly mentions the AC frequency doing too can damage the grid. This damage can actually lead to months long power outages for large regions.
AFAIK users have the option of signing up for the fixed rate plan or the variable rate plans when they sign up with their provider. That's why not everyone got hit with the multi-thousand dollar bills during 2021, they had benefitted from the lower pricing in general but were hung out to dry during these spikes.
It would have had blackouts if it didn't build all those bitcoin mines. The bitcoin mines encouraged power infrastructure development, and they can just be taken offline when high heat causes power demand spikes for air conditioning.
I'm not from Texas so genuinely asking, is there hard proof that anyone specifically invested in power infrastructure because of bitcoin mines in a way they wouldn't have otherwise?
> I'm not from Texas so genuinely asking, is there hard proof that anyone specifically invested in power infrastructure because of bitcoin mines in a way they wouldn't have otherwise?
In theory supply and demand still exists in Texas, and Bitcoin miners do demand a lot of energy. Assuming that energy companies are including Bitcoin miners in their demand projections (I don't see why they wouldn't?) then the default assumption is that just based on the market forces at play, capacity should have been built with Bitcoin miner demand included.
This is the same logic that says bitcoin encouraged green power building but in reality they just absorb the excess power from the cheapest source available so they're essentially offsetting any new power generation by simply consuming more power when it's available. They anchor the rate around what is profitable to mine at so power doesn't get lower unless/until mining becomes less profitable.
Doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations, it seems that a power company would make more money selling wholesale power to the open market in ERCOT than it would mining bitcoin.
The simple fact of the matter is Texas does not have sufficient electrical generation capacity to satiate its demands, especially given the record spate of hot days (it's been daily highs above 100F in Austin for two months). There's no need to add extra sources of demand to encourage new supply.
People literally freezing to death amidst billions of dollars of water damage to homes via busted pipes didn't encourage the state to upgrade its infrastructure.
Just a few months ago on HN there was a thread discussing the upcoming summer.
Was surprised just how many 'free-market' advocates came out to say how great things were, how the market has created additional supply, and all this was just lib panic.
They are paying 'crypto-miners' to temporarily stop running? That is absurd. So I could make money just by moving a mining operation to Texas, and wait for a shutdown.
How much failure does it take to realize some regulation is good. It benefits everyone.
The market did create a ton of supply. It added so much supply electric contracts went as low as $0.10/kWh including delivery costs at the start of the summer. It added several state's worth of supply. Its just people demanded even more with 7x more growth in demand than historical.
That is a pretty misleading presentation, because of the cherry-picked dates and conflating (apparently) capacity-related outages with public safety shutoffs, and for not weighting by population impact.
California has not had any capacity-related problems in the past 2 years, mostly due to the fact that they now have 5.5GW of battery backup capacity that covers the critical period at dusk, when solar generation is headed for zero, during late summer where the days are getting shorter but it is still hot.
> they now have 5.5GW of battery backup capacity that covers the critical period at dusk, when solar generation is headed for zero, during late summer where the days are getting shorter but it is still hot
Am I supposed to interpret "covers critical period at dusk..." as the "hours" part of 5.5GW? Because I'm having trouble grokking what is the actual battery backup capacity described here... Does CA have battery capacity that can last a single evening @ 5.5GW of load?
MI downtime is a result of cutting back on expensive tree trimming and other upkeep functions. We had a good run of very light storms but we’re back to normal wind and all those tree limbs that should have been taken care of now are adding up the down time.
This is... amazing. Not in a good way.