Electric customers to be charged for blackouts

[BrightKnight]

Source: WFAA - TV (wfaa.com)

DALLAS — Customers who are not locked into a contract with their retail electric provider could end up with much higher bills after rolling blackouts in many parts of the state on Wednesday.

"The people on variable rate plans are probably going to see the worst of it," said Tom Smith, state director of the watchdog group Public Citizen, Inc. "Their bills are going to go up to reflect the very high prices that were paid on Wednesday morning."
...


On most days, Smith said, providers pay about $45 per megawatt hour. The Electric Reliability Counci of Texas said a single megawatt can power 200 homes during extreme temperatures.

But during the rolling blackouts on Wednesday morning, the price of wholesale electricity skyrocketed. Power plants charged providers the maximum: $3,000 a megawatt hour."]

Read more: http://www.wfaa.com/news/consumer/Electric-customers-to...

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I could not see that coming.

It smells like someone has been digging up Kenny Boy. Several power plants mysteriously lost capacity during a period of higher demand and rates went sky high. Does a 15 to 25 degree day really require more power than a 110 degree day? We can have temperatures well over 100 degrees for weeks. This is winter and they knew that the cold front was coming. This is only about 10 degrees colder that the weather that we had. In Texas you can blame anything on a little snow.

Since deregulation we pay some of the highest rates in the Country. Are these companies investing in infrastructure or just paying themselves bonuses?

[PDittie]

1. Paul Burka is cranky when he doesn't get a hot breakfast

I was on my way to Houston on Wednesday to speak to the Greater Houston Partnership when I was caught in the rolling blackout. I made it as far as Elgin on U.S. 290, where the traffic lights were blinking red and cops were standing in the bitter cold, directing motorists. My intention was to stop at McDonald’s for a breakfast sandwich and coffee. The drive-through line was quite long and very slow, and the speaker at which I sought to place my order wasn’t working. As I was contemplating my next move, a young woman who worked there emerged from the building and started walking down the line of cars. She informed me that the only thing they could serve was sausage biscuits and bottled water, because the power was out. And cash only, please; credit cards couldn’t be processed. Eventually I got my stale sausage biscuit and headed on my way.

As I got back on the highway, I reflected that my breakfast experience was the perfect metaphor for the great budget meltdown of 2011. Nothing in state government works. ERCOT, which exists to make certain that the grid function correctly, failed miserably. State officials couldn’t even explain what went wrong, much less fix it. That’s as hard to swallow as my biscuit.

We run state government on a shoestring. We have a $10 billion structural budget deficit and nobody has the slightest interest in fixing it. Is anyone surprised that we can’t even get through a winter storm without having our infrastructure fail us?

http://www.texasmonthly.com/blogs/burkablog/?p=9162&sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4d4babf196ca4c74%2C0

[sonias]

2. "ERCOT...failed miserably"

I would have to say that I agree with him on that statement.

This is the perfect example of republican rule - deregulation to benefit private companies that are pretty much unaccountable. You notice that they don't have to disclose which companies experienced shutdowns of equipment because it's a "trade secret".

What total bullshit! :mad:

[Melissa G]

3. Maybe we should ask the Texas Lege to investigate this?

:sarcasm: Fox, Guard Henhouse...

[sonias]

4. ROFL

Which ones do you think would want to pull that curtain back?

Yes I know you were being sarcastic! :P

[susanr516]

12. It's a shame there's no market demand for stupid

We could open a stupid bottling plant in the state Capitol, and never have to worry about another budget deficit. :rofl:

[sonias]

5. Some Companies Made Millions Off the Texas Blackouts

Texas Observer 2/3/11

Some Companies Made Millions Off the Texas Blackouts

While Texans suffered rolling blackouts yesterday, some power generators were enjoying windfall profits. Starting around 5 a.m., prices in the wholesale market surged to the market cap, $3,000 per megawatt-hour, and stayed there, off and on, until around noon. Prices are typically below $100/megawatt-hour, acknowledged ERCOT CEO H.P. "Trip" Doggett today in a press conference.

There are still more questions than answers but this much is clear: At best, some power generators around the state raked in oodles of money thanks to the way ERCOT has structured the energy market. At worst, some may have manipulated the market to drive up prices.

In the end, the price surge yesterday could cost consumers tens of millions of dollars, said David Power, deputy director of Public Citizen-Texas. Although residential consumers are typically insulated from temporary wholesale price spikes, "Somebody ends up paying for it," said Power.

Yep and that somebody is always the consumer! :grr:

[sonias]

6. Cold exposes jumble of flaws in Texas electric policies

Fort Worth Star_Telegram 2/3/11
Cold exposes jumble of flaws in Texas electric policies

A key state senator blamed some of Texas' power problems Wednesday on a decades-old policy that, at least for one day, unintentionally pitted the state's natural gas system against electricity power plants, both of which were struggling to meet near-unprecedented demand amid an ice storm that settled across most of the state.

Sen. Troy Fraser, R-Horseshoe Bay, chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, said the much-hated "rolling blackouts" ordered by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas were caused in part when Atmos Energy reduced natural gas pressure to power plants generating electricity, a normal procedure when natural gas usage is reaching critical levels.

Fraser described the situation as "the right hand not talking to the left," which left millions of Texans with intermittent power on the coldest day in North Texas in close to 20 years.

:kick:

[BrightKnight]

7. 50 plants failed at once! How many failed in the rest of the country?

http://www.click2houston.com/news/26731714/detail.html

Someone should turn the National spotlight on these roaches.

[white cloud]

8. K&R

:evilfrown:

[sonias]

9. New meme - "environmental regulations are causing the failure"

Yes! In a classic case of blaming the EPA and Obama for everything that goes wrong in Texas.

Texas Tribune 2/3/11
The Rolling Chain of Events Behind Texas Blackouts

(snip)
State Sen. Troy Fraser, R-Horseshoe Bay, in a phone call with the Tribune today, stressed that conclusions are still tentative but said a chain reaction of problems involving the state's coal and gas plants appeared to be the cause — and wind plants were having trouble, too. So far no blackouts have been ordered today.

Electricity demand spiked in Texas yesterday as the cold weather struck, setting a wintertime record for usage. Summer usage is higher, but winter also can bring strong demand because about two-thirds of Texas homes are heated with electricity.

Initially, it appears, some coal plants went offline due to cold-weather problems, taking a large chunk of electricity out of the grid. Luminant, a major power-generation company, confirmed that its two coal units at the Oak Grove plant in Robertson County failed, as did two units at a coal plant in Milam County. "We are in various stages of start-up and operation for that group," Allan Koenig, a Luminant spokesman, said via e-mail. Three of these four units only began operating in the last few years; Fraser, who chairs the Senate Committee on Natural Resources, noted that they had new emissions-control technologies, and said one question was how those technologies had handled the cold.

Emphasis mine in the story above. Note how quickly the industry will pick up on that meme and start to blame new pollution control technologies for the plant shut down failures! :eyes:

[BrightKnight]

11. Apparently the coal emissions-control technology used in Texas is unique?!!.

Did they actually hire a supplier to design emissions control technology to meet EPA regulations that was unique to Texas? That sounds unnecessarily expensive. The technology is so new that has never been tested in 25 degree weather. Actually, it has been working fine at these temperatures and suddenly 2 plants failed and a total of 50 plants went off line at once. The had to jack the rate up from $45 to $3000 rapidly and it's all Obama's fault.

How many coal plants in other states failed with colder weather?

Repugs tell such interesting stories. I am guessing that this all happened while he was hiking on the AT with Perry. That might explain why nobody has heard from the Governor.

[sonias]

14. National spotlight - here it comes

Houston Chronicle 2/7/11
Shedding light on blackouts
State overseers, grid operator want power companies to answer for electrical outages during last week's storm

(snip)
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a Princeton, N.J.-based regulatory group that oversees power grid reliability issues across the United States and Canada, is also investigating. Among the issues it will look at: How many power plants ERCOT had allowed to be down for maintenance at the time of the outage.

Eric Rollison, a NERC engineer who works on annual reliability assessments of grid operators, said the amount of power plant capacity that ERCOT said in a fall report that it planned to allow offline for scheduled maintenance during winter months doesn't match the amount of capacity that was offline Wednesday.

"NERC is reviewing why there is such a large discrepancy between the actual value (12,000 MW) and their predicted value for this winter, which was collected at the end of September 2010 (approximately 4,000 MW)," said Rollison in an e-mail. "We are trying to understand what happened between the time of the assessment and the events that occurred last week."

Well let's hope they really do get to the bottom of the discrepancy for planned offline maintenance plants and how many really were off.

:eyes:

[toddwv]

10. Shocker. Texas deregulates and now they are getting Enroned.

Guess who's going to be paying increasingly higher rates this summer with rolling blackouts to boot?

I'll give you a hint...it ain't the customers in regulated states...

[sonias]

13. +10

Yep - same as it always was....

Rs force deregulation and the rates go through the roof, the private businesses make off like bandits, and the consumers get fleeced!

:grr:

[sonias]

15. Will Texas Blackouts Cause Higher Electric Rates?

Short answer - yes

Texas Tribune 2/10/11
Will Texas Blackouts Cause Higher Electric Rates?

Hey, Texplainer: Will my rates go up because of last week's electricity mess?

Lots of Texans are asking that question in the wake of last week's rolling blackouts, and nobody's going to be happy with the answer, which is: "It depends" (if you ask electricity experts); or "Yes" (if you ask consumer advocates).

The debacle clearly will carry a hefty price-tag. While Texans' lights went out, real-time wholesale prices of electricity shot up to more than 100 times above normal — and stayed astronomical, limited only by a price cap, for hours. That's how the laws of supply and demand work when 15 percent of the state's power plants fail at once.

Ordinary Texans won't see any immediate change in their electricity rates. That's because we don't buy electricity from that see-saw wholesale market. Instead, people who live in certain cities, like Austin and San Antonio, buy their power from municipal utilities, which generate some of their own electricity from power plants but also buy electricity on the wholesale market. Texans living in "deregulated" parts of the state — which is to say, most of the rest of Texas, including Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston — buy power from retail electric companies, which buy all their power on the wholesale market.

But in the next few months, rates for some Texans are likely to rise because of the blackouts, says Tom "Smitty" Smith of Public Citizen, an environmental and consumer advocacy group. Texans in deregulated parts of the state who signed up for a flexible rate plan, which allows the power company to change its rates based on fluctuating energy costs, could see an impact in 60 to 90 days, he said.

:shrug: