Texas power prices briefly soar 1,600% as a spring heat wave is expected to drive record demand for energy
fortune.com
For about one hour late Friday, day-ahead prices on ERCOT's website jumped as high as $688 per MWh.

lmao lmao.

Reminder that Texas is a separate grid, which is deregulated and financialized, according to neoliberal ideals of efficiency.

  • UltraGreen [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    22·
    6 months ago

    I hate it here. Texas is a hellhole. There are zero redeeming qualities about living in this state. It’s too hot, the environment is ugly and barren, every city is a concrete jungle, flat and full of parking lots and nothing else.

    If my power goes out at the peak of the heat, I guess I’m killing an ercot exec?

    • invo_rt [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      21·
      6 months ago

      every city is a concrete jungle, flat and full of parking lots and nothing else

      I visited Dallas once. Stayed in a hotel for a weekend-long event. Wanted to go get food. “Hey, I can see stuff right across the street, let’s walk.” The street is a fucking massive highway with no crossings unless you walk like a mile in either direction to get to an intersection and then a mile back to get to the food. Repeat to get back to the hotel.

      youre-awful

      • atyaz [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        4·
        6 months ago

        I had the exact same experience in Dallas. Do we work for the same company or is that just how Dallas is everywhere.

        • JayTwo [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          5·
          6 months ago

          That’s just metropolitan Texas. Houston is just as bad if not worse. Austin is a lot better though but only because the bar is pretty low.

    • Tunnelvision [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      7·
      6 months ago

      Having power go out during peak summer never used to happen. Texas sucks ass, but genuinely we produce enough energy that we often sell it to the other energy grids from what I understand. We shouldn’t really have any brown/blackouts at all other than the freezes.

      • HexBroke [any, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        4·
        6 months ago

        Summer probably wasn’t as hot (as 2023 and probably 2024)

        On an hourly basis, ERCOT load had never exceeded 80,000 megawatts (MW) before this summer. Not only was a record 85,464 MW load set on Aug. 10, but demand breached 80,000 MW on 42 days between June 1 and Aug. 31

        16 percent growth in two years will cause challenges for any infrastructure

        Population and GDP cannot explain peak summer load growth of 9 percent in 2022 and 7 percent in 2023

        • Tunnelvision [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          7·
          6 months ago

          Ercot has been saying this for almost a decade at this point though. I’m not arguing it isn’t hotter than it used to be, I’m saying it’s more likely that they’re lying about the reasoning for it. Like their lack of modernization of the infrastructure in general.

          • Assian_Candor [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
            10·
            6 months ago

            ERCOT is a bazinga system operator set up by the characters from looney tunes. They’re the only system operator without a forward capacity market. Everyone else pays uneconomic reserve plants money just to stay connected and ready to respond to demand spikes, but the brain trust at ERCOT decided it would be cheaper for rate payers to not do that. Turns out it is until it isn’t, and the only way they have to balance supply with demand is to curtail demand with eye bleedingly high real time prices since there isn’t enough slack in the system.

          • HexBroke [any, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
            4·
            6 months ago

            I would be surprised if there isn’t any manipulation of the market.

            Some of my state’s SOE electricity generators got sued by the federal government for price manipulation on the national energy market (and then they gave up and changed the rules to try and stop it)