RE:RE:RE:Texas Grid Failure yggdrasill wrote: You say the cost would have been too high to winterize the plants and I believe you. But that's why you need a strong regulating body to force these changes. You can't leave it up to the generators because obviously the cost to them is great, and they only need to think about their own bottom line. However this crisis hasn't just affected their own bottom line. It's affected all business in Texas to the tune of billions, and it has cost lives on top of that. So you need a strong regulating body to think about the risk and cost to the entire state. The bottom line of energy generators becomes a non-factor.
Texas needs to winterize their plants one way or another. Whether generators are made to assume all the costs of that or if state subsidies are needed can be discussed, but winterization is essential and urgent. Every other state has managed to do it, so I'm sure Texas can too.
Like I said before, I don't know the particularities of Texas energy distribution (that's my disclaimer, as they could have specific flaws in their system that means the following wouldn't apply to them).
However, you'd be surprised that regulators are often the ones putting the breaks on extra investments in supply (to improve network responses and reliability when facing extreme weather conditions). Consumer groups often advocate that the expense (which would result in a raise of rates for consumers) is unnecessary. I know energy companies that have put forward plans to add peak capacity and redundancy to their system to face potential cold waves that were shot down by the regulator. Here, we need to file for approval for any spending (even 5k... on overall expenses of over $1B) if we buy power in excess of what the regulator deems sufficient. If we have a polar vortex, we'll have to shutdown customers because our system can't support that, but it's out of our hands as the regulator wouldn't approve the required spendings.
From what I've read about Texas, the equipment on their grid can't even support the required loads based on the weather. So, even if they had the peak power to supply the load, the grid wouldn't support it. That's a lot of investments to reinforce the grid. Then, you need to have backup power for all the wind power. While wind power can work in winter conditions, it's not a suitable peak power management source as they are providing irregular loads even when working fully. Putting backup contracts in place for peak power to replace the wind farms is costly. Nat gas power plant should definately be winterized, overall that shouldn't be a huge cost. All those investments will show up on customer's bills.