And Even More On Texas

Marginal Revolution put out a bleg for informed commentary about the situation in Texas.

The action is all in the comments. There is some devolution into name calling, but not much.

I learned stuff from:

• peri: Agreed. I lived in four homes in two parts of the southeast for 11 years. The house construction is not good.
• bart johnson: I had not heard of capacity payments. That sounds a little like my GoT suggestion, only more civilized.
• Walter: the first half was good, but I thought the second half finger-pointed a lot.
• Nonlinear Power: notes the incentives in Texas aren't great, but Alberta has similar ones and has no problems, so he blames the weather.
• DiodeWest: notes that ERCOT (the Texas grid) is all about low cost, and not quality
• Andrew Adams: if power is so cheap in Texas, why haven't the savings gone to quality?
• RF_Austin: is not correct. There is a price cap, but it is insanely high and not likely to be binding (except of course in a crazy storm). From what I read about it, it's so high that it looks like the biggest default value they could code in (I think it was $9,000 for something that is usually $25)
• KSC: retail customer loyalty is low in Texas. In most places, you're locked in to your utility.
• PHinton: an excellent point about how you have to be more reliable the bigger your share of the market, and wind isn't where it needs to be on that.

One commenter recommend this post from StreetWiseProfessor, which I liked. The bit about negative prices is new to me with renewables, but the economics of this are well-known, and they are not pretty. 

Derrill Watson, a professor at Tarleton State (whose CV makes me think he might know Swigert and Price) writing at Notes On Liberty, has a pretty good discussion for his principles students.

Daniel Cohan has a tweet storm pinned to the top of his Twitter page. He makes a number of good points. One of the things he notes is that current battery capacity within ERCOT is 0.3% of peak usage. He's also all over the details ERCOT's scenario analysis, and argues they weren't too far off the mark with their worst cases. He is rough on the failure of the gas power generation industry, and the problem created because there's competition for the resource from the gas heating industry. He slams coal (and rightfully so) ... but he does the really bad thing of saying that we need to replace it with something more reliable. Like what, unicorns??