By Robert Bradley Jr. — May 5, 2023
“The supply-side reliability fix offered by the Texas Senate is a direct response to the February 2021 carnage created by, yes, wind and solar taking over a once reliable grid. It is a hard-wired governmental solution to a soft-wired governmental problem. But there is an alternative. Free markets, anyone?”
The big guns of climate alarmism and forced energy transformation are out to prevent Texas from shoring up its grid from the cancer of wind and solar. Out of the blue, the Texas Energy and Power Newsletter (Substack) appears, with the message that renewables are not the problem but the solution, complemented by, in Doug Lewin’s words, “Fast-acting reciprocating engines, batteries, geothermal power, and demand response [to] help with both resource adequacy and operational flexibility.”
In denial about the wounded supply side–where the obvious solution is to demote (government-enabled) intermittent resources–the answer is “smart meters” in the home so Big Brother can oversee demand. “In fact,” states Lewin,
there are 1 million smart thermostats on Texans’ walls right now that are not being used at all! Creating incentives for Texas families to reduce their power use when supplies get tight would create a massive dispatchable resource that could help this summer.
For students of political economy, this is the process of regulation (the Mises interventionist thesis) whereby the problems of intervention lead to more intervention. And in the case of Texas (and California and other states), a wounded supply side raises the call for ever-greater demand-side intervention–all from a centrally planned wholesale market (such as the Electric Reliability Council of Texas).
Texas’s cancer is continuing to grow with wind and solar being added to the system, thanks to 1) extended government incentives in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act and 2) take rules by ERCOT based on marginal cost (wind and solar have higher total costs and very low marginal costs). And the worsening reliability of the grid from expanding intermittency is leading to (first voluntary, then mandatory) “conservation orders,” such as summer temperatures in the home or business of, say, 76 degrees.
The amount of money available to the Energy Statists is overwhelming, and the sudden entry of the Texas Energy and Power Newsletter is part that. They want central planning to reach a total government power market rather than 1) stop and reverse the cancer of spreading wind/solar and 2) work toward abolishing a centrally planned wholesale market.
The supply-side reliability fix offered by the Texas Senate is a direct response to the February 2021 carnage created by, yes, wind and solar taking over a once strong grid. It is a hard-wired governmental solution to a soft-wired governmental problem. But there is an alternative that is obvious and necessary.
Free markets anyone?
Free markets require free people and stripping freedoms away is the imperative – what you can eat, what you can drive, what energy you can use, ad nauseam.
It isn’t going to end peacefully – unless of course you see it on CNN
The solution is really simple. End all subsidies. End preferential feed-ins. Make projects justify their economics on actual capacity delivered to the grid (i.e., project pays for any new transmission required to connect it).
But we’re talking about government here, so it’s never going to happen.
Well, it sounds simple enough, I’ll give you that.
It’s not just government, but a whole new (doomist) religion. Promoted everywhere all of the time.
Well put.
There are big plans.
The great thing about plans is they go boobs up more or less straight away
Boobs up and at the top for sure.
Senator Kennedy has a way of getting right to the heart of the matter.
I love that smile on his face. He knows he is facing someone who doesn’t know what they are talking about.
“But we’re talking about government here, so it’s never going to happen.”
There are exceptions. Oklahoma stopped paying subsidies to new windmill farms some time ago.
This apparently, has led to an Oklahoma energy company that wants to build windmills and solar, to decide to build them in Texas and Kansas and then send the power they generate to Oklahoma.
Will Oklahoma get to keep its Texas-generated electricity if Texas has another blackout problem? Texas may want to keep that electricity in Texas, at least temporarily.
I assume the Oklahoma company building in Texas and Kansas is doing so as a result of Oklahoma no longer paying subsidies for these things.
Warren Buffet said the only reason to invest in windmills and solar was for the State and Federal subsidies.
Take the subsidies away, and the windmills and solar are not economically viable on their own.
Yes, we should definitely let the Market decide and stop subsidizing windmills and solar.
What Texas-generated electricity? From windmills? If Texas is blacked out, it’s going to be because the wind isn’t blowing.
I imagine Texas will hold onto all of their unicorn fart and fairy dust-generated electricity, too.
Taxing any subsidized supplier that is intermittent to provide backup would be one remedy. Texas cannot deal with Federal subsidies as such, but taxing the recipients would be posssible.
Unless some one can find a simple and easily understood explanation proving that CO 2 sensitivity is minimal at increasing levels ; well this debate will be lost and then we’ll you know. Often our discussions here are esoteric. The general public relies on their “ heart of hearts” not “ science “
1) CMoB is “some one” who tried that right here at WUWT just 2 days ago.
Link to article : https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/05/04/the-elephants-in-the-room/
Link [ if I’m lucky, this will “embed and display automatically” here ] to the “relevant elephant” image file …
2) Different people have different “It’s obvious what I mean …” criteria for what constitutes “simple” and “easy” understanding.
Please at least attempt to come up with “a simple and easily understood explanation” on your own, even if it’s just to highlight the problems with your attempt afterwards.
3) Science doesn’t do “proof”. “Proof” is reserved for mathematics (/ logic) and alcohol.
ok thanks don’t know how i missed that
In vino veritas.
There are no real proofs in climate science because one cannot run repeatable and definitive experiments with the Earth’s climate. AGW has been falsifiedby science. If adding CO2 to the Earth’s atmosphere really caused surface warming then one would expect that the increase in CO2 over the past 30 years would have caused at least a measureable increase in the dry lapse rate in the troposphere but that has not happened. The temperature profile of the atmosphere is a good measure of its thermal insulating effects. As derived from first principals, the lapse rate is equal to -g/cp where g is the acceleration of gravity and cp is the heat capacity of the atmosphere at constant pressure. this has nothing to do with the LWIR absorption properties of any component gases. So one would expect that the warming effect of CO2, it it exists at all, must be very small. H2Os moving heat energy up through the atmosphere and radiating it out to space from the upper atmosphere is another issue. H2O, the primary so called green gas, actually acts as a net coolant in the troposphere. A good discussion of all of this can be found in”the Rational Climate e-Book” by Patrice Poyet. The download is free.
A simple and direct market solution that doesn’t breach any contract nor violates the merit order (least marginal cost principle), but that requires common sense and political courage, is to assign the inevitable backup generation cost of thermal sources —which would be zero if it wasn´t because of unreliables— which are always the life jacket from intermittent renewable attacks on a power grid and capable of restoring its stability. This would make the renewable levelized cost always way higher than that of any thermal source and it would be the death sentence ‘ipso facto’ to that red, unreliable, non-renewable, unsustainable and very expensive dead weight. If not, Texas will once again have to face another blackout with hundreds of deaths while the wavering political class enjoys watches the show pretending to be saving the planet.
Texit, anyone?
It’s worth looking at where ERCOT has got to so far. For a start it has a new broom in charge – Pablo Vegas. During a panel discussion at CERA week the Honorable Peter Lake, PUCT chairman, said, “Everyone in Texas wants a reliable grid that delivers the lowest cost possible and a transparent and fair market.”
https://www.bicmagazine.com/departments/maintenance-reliability/industry-leaders-weigh-in-on-texas-electricity-market-reform/
Vegas responded:
“Essentially you have three legs of a stool. You’ve got an energy market where energy is bought and sold in real time, the ancillary services market, which the energy market supports, and the capacity market,” Vegas said.
The capacity market, he said, ensures sufficient capacity can meet a market’s energy needs at any point during the most extreme heat or cold, and to send signals based on the reliability standard of what is expected in performance, he said. That reliability standard, in turn, creates a value in the capacity market.
“Texas is a little unique,” Vegas continued. “Texas only has two legs of that stool — an energy market and an ancillary services market. Texas doesn’t have a capacity market.”
For 20 years, Vegas said, Texas businesses have enjoyed some of the lowest cost energy in the world because it was a highly efficient market designed specifically to create the lowest cost energy possible at any point in time.
“That’s a fantastic model which has worked very well,” Vegas said. “But when you’ve got a market which says, ‘I’m only designed for efficiency at a low cost,’ you’re missing a really important leg to that stool, and that stool’s in danger of falling over. We crossed over to that point in 2022 at the peak point of the summer when we relied on renewables to be there. If renewables are not there, the power will go out.”
“I want to be very clear about that,” Vegas emphasized. “As the CEO of ERCOT, I’m accountable for that and I’m accountable to the Public Utility Commission and to the legislature in Texas. I want people to know. I’m telling everybody that if renewables are not available at peak points in time, the power will go out, so we need to change the model.”
The proposal is the so called Performance Credit Mechanism
https://www.texaselectricityratings.com/blog/how-the-performance-credit-mechanism-works/
which has an annual cost anywhere between $460m and $5.7bn, according to which interest groups you listen to. There is clearly a fear of the unknown, as no grid has implemented a scheme quite like this: most run to payments for capacity quite explicitly, perhaps via an auction, rather than leaving it to generators to sell performance guarantees. There’s more on the PUC vision for PCM here:
https://interchange.puc.texas.gov/Documents/53298_23_1265741.PDF
Are these people mental “Fast-acting reciprocating engines, batteries, geothermal power, and demand response [to] help with both resource adequacy and operational flexibility.” I have been in Texas, I don’t think there are many geothermal possibilities, what is going to power those reciprocating engines ….natural gas, I guess…..and batteries are ridiculously expensive and an environmental nightmare and how exactly is a smart meter supposed to work when the grid goes down. I have a much better solution, its quite scenic around Austin, so lets build a nice home where all the proponents of “renewables” can sit around and tell each other stories of how it will all work when the magic happens. It will be much better for all concerned.
The free market already exists. You are free to not use electric power or make your own.
I live in an RV and have 3 generators. If I have a choice I choose to plug in. For example, I was in a New Mexico state park. It was $6/day more for a camp site with power and water. That is more than my fuel cost per day.
My next camp site was in city park in Texas. It was free including plugging into power.
Earlier this week, I took a short cut on a gravel road through a large wind farm driving between two turbines at one point. Very cool!
I am old school. There should be a 25% reserve margin because shit happens.
Of course that cost money and people want cheap power. Do not blame wind because we elect stupid people.
I don’t think we here at WUWT blame “wind”.
We blame the corrupt politicians and their crony capitalist brethren that rent seek through government intervention and then build unreliable generation “capacity” while making a bundle.
Of course most of us at WUWT don’t actually elect the “stupid people” of whom you speak. They may get elected in the districts we live in, but WE don’t vote for them.
There is a difference between stupid and corrupt. Of course there is stupid and corrupt.
Many years ago my company encouraged us to write our senators and congressman on power issues and provided a suggested letter. I wrote my own letter specific to local issues.
I got a letter from my congressmen that my letter had been read and supported complex local issues. The letters from senators indicated that these women and their staff did not understand environmental issues in our state and would follow the party line that wind and solar will solve all problems.
The legislation passed and the following year my company moved me from an anti nuke state to Virginia to design new nuke plants. While there my power rates went up 30% because of anti-coal federal legislation.
Our congressman came and spoke at our company and blamed the greedy power company not the bill he voted for. This position might sound good to college students but he was speaking to people in the power industry in a district with coal mining. How stupid is that?
I could not wait to vote him out of office. Except he was not on my ballot. I lived in the county and our good old boy ran unopposed like my last congressman because he did a good job for his district.
The stupid guy was a one term and gone.
There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on global climate so this is not really about climate reality. If they were really wanted to conserve on the use of fossil fuels they need to be gradually replacing ageing fossil fuel burning power plants with nuclear power plants. Solar may be of value to home owners especially as a source of backup power but we need better and cheaper solar panels and batteries all made here in the USA.
Isn’t it interesting that these people understand so little economics? The size of an economy is directly related to the energy requirment to keep it operating. Demand management (reduction) will immediately lead to a reduction in economic output. It does appear that domestic use will receive most of the hit, caused by smart meters etc., but unhappy people with cold houses (or ones too hot in Texas in summer) are not as productive as happy ones. I wonder why this is never realised, as Governments try to extract more and more money from the economy, to fund Green projects (Biden particularly)?