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CirclesX’s lawsuit seeks the return of those profits on behalf of all Texans, which would go to repay public debt issued in 2021.
(Pull quote from the above article)
In a pending lawsuit, Houston energy data firm CirclesX alleges pipeline operators routinely manipulate natural gas supplies to drive up prices during weather events.
These companies went too far in February 2021, CirclesX says, inadvertently triggering statewide blackouts that left hundreds of Texans dead.
CirclesX’s lawsuit seeks the return of those profits on behalf of all Texans, which would go to repay public debt issued in 2021.
^^^^^^^^^
You could give 2 s for any of that nonsense. You want that governorship, bub. And ya's ain't gettin' it.
Greed kills, Texas turns a blind eye.
You're wasting your time, Winester. You ain't a gonna turn Texas, son. No.
adding battery storage capacity is one thing Texas did right to contribute to reliability
A battery boom is helping to stabilize the Texas power grid, offering a template for utilities that want to cut their greenhouse gases even as air conditioners hum wildly during heat waves.
The growth of batteries was evident last week when energy storage facilities injected a record amount of power into Texas’ electric system. It was badly needed on an evening when the state’s primary grid operator had called on consumers to conserve energy.
“I think it's a really big deal. I think it's underappreciated and under-talked about at this point,” said Doug Lewin, an Austin, Texas-based energy consultant who authors the Texas Energy and Power Newsletter. Without batteries, he said, “I think it's likely that on Thursday night, we would have been in the emergency conditions.”https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...-grid-humming/Batteries represent the next chapter in Texas’ evolution because they stabilize the grid in the evening, when energy demand is high and solar generation plummets. Texas has installed 2.5 gigawatts of battery capacity over the last five years — about a quarter of total U.S. battery capacity. Only California has installed more.
via Doug Levin
this is another good move, a distributed energy pilot program
Two ‘virtual power plants’ (VPPs) are now qualified and able to provide dispatchable power to the Texas electric grid, which is operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). This marks a first for the state’s electricity market and is part of the Aggregate Distributed Energy Resource (ADER) pilot project the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) directed ERCOT to begin developing in June 2022. The pilot project tests how consumer-owned, small energy devices, such as battery energy storage systems, backup generators, and controllable Electric Vehicle (EV) chargers, can be virtually aggregated and participate as a resource in the wholesale electricity market, strengthening grid reliability. “Small energy resources found in homes and businesses across Texas have incredible potential to continue improving grid reliability and resiliency by selling the excess power they generate to the ERCOT system,” said PUCT Commissioner Will McAdams. “It’s a win-win for Texas. Home and business owners get paid for power they supply and consumers in ERCOT get more reliability.” “This ADER pilot project is an example of the electric industry, PUCT and ERCOT developing a pilot to solve issues rather than just studying them. The collaboration achieved the clear goals outlined by the Commission and is a model for future projects at the PUCT,” said PUCT Commissioner Jimmy Glotfelty. “We have a market in ERCOT that allows us to innovate and learn through real time experimentation with real-world impact.” Texans are increasingly investing in small energy resources, such as backup generators or solar panels connected to battery energy storage systems, for their homes and businesses. There are currently 2.3 GW of these small (less than 1 MW each) resources across the state, with 300 MW added so far in 2023 alone. An ADER represents the aggregation of devices that are located at multiple sites as a single resource. The ADER coordinates the operation of individual devices to collectively reduce demand or feed power to the grid. Through an automated process, the ADER responds to specific ERCOT instructions, allowing participating customers to sell their surplus power to the grid when called upon or reduce use. This is an additional source of dispatchable power for the ERCOT grid.https://ftp.puc.texas.gov/public/puc...First_Time.pdfADERs are formed and operated by retail electric providers or utilities that sell electricity to homes and businesses. In this pilot project, compensation terms and participation requirements will vary depending on the provider operating the ADER. To qualify for the pilot project, an ADER must be able to produce at least 100 kW, and each individual device in the ADER must be less than 1 MW. The average residential battery is about 5 kW. The pilot project is currently capped at80 MW of total participation to ensure a safe and controlled roll out.“As generation and distribution technology continues to improve, we expect to see more Texans taking advantage of these small energy resources in the future,” said ERCOT President and CEO Pablo Vegas. “This pilot project is an opportunity for us, the electric industry, and participants to learn how to harness these resources to support reliability in the ERCOT market.”
Looks like 8PM is going to be another close call today
Grid still not fixed
https://www.texasstandard.org/storie...rcot-forecast/To give you an example, the largest power plant in this call was the Deely Plant that CPS Energy in San Antonio retired in 2018. So it has been offline for five years, and they want them to bring it back in two months, which CPS Energy CEO Rudy Garza said is just not possible.
So it’s really frustrating that here in October, with two months to go, state leaders are scrambling to try to get zombie power plants online when for the last two years they’ve been neglecting energy efficiency, which could lower demand – because when you’re in these winter situations, there’s two sides of the coin: Do you have enough supply to meet demand? So you can add supply, or you can reduce demand, or you could do both.
And of course, we still have not adequately addressed the weatherization and winterization of natural gas supply, which is outside ERCOT’s control, but certainly not outside of state leaders’ control.
Free market didn't come to the rescue, and we're all out of ideas for the coming winter which, if the El Niño pattern holds, will be colder than usual.
Last edited by Winehole23; 11-20-2023 at 11:11 AM.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/bus...m-18489067.phpThe surcharge for Houston residential customers is 11.225 cents per 100 cubic feet of gas, which adds $3.48 to the average monthly bill, Hundley wrote. In total, CenterPoint’s customers will be paying off almost $1.1 billion of costs incurred by the company due to Winter Storm Uri, she said.
Only one other utility has greater costs than CenterPoint: Atmos Energy, whose customers will be paying down more than $2 billion in debt.
The costs showing up in monthly utility bills are expected to be passed along for at least the next 16 years, according to statements from the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state’s oil and gas regulator.
The payments are structured under a legislature-approved process known as securitization, which allows bonds to be issued so utilities can raise the more than $3.5 billion they need to pay back natural gas suppliers for gas purchased during Uri and for legal and consulting costs related to the gas procurement and the securitization process. Utilities then collect from their customers the new surcharge, dubbed the customer rate relief charge, to pay for the cost of the bonds, which carry an interest rate of 5.1%.
Great article in Bloomberg about the pipeline biz and intrastrate pipelines in particular.
tl;dr
The Texas pipeline monopoly screws energy companies and the public, Texas allows it to do so, and as a result, the Texas grid is less reliable. Texas also allows pipeline operators to participate in trading, without any firewall between trading and operations.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231205...xas-pipelines/“It’s authorized monopoly abuse. There’s no other way to get around it,” said Beth Garza, who served for five years as a watchdog for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or Ercot, as the state’s grid operator is known. “If there’s only one provider of a key service and there’s no limit on what that provider can charge for their product, that provider is going to profit-maximize by as much as they can get away with,” said Garza, now a senior fellow at the R Street Ins ute, a free-market think tank in Washington.
The more expensive it is to move gas on a pipeline, the more it costs power plants and local utilities to generate electricity or send that fuel directly to homes and businesses. Eventually, consumers feel that. But because Texas intrastate pipeline contracts aren’t publicly available, it’s impossible to know how their rates and penalties affect what Texans ultimately pay.
Last edited by Winehole23; 12-07-2023 at 03:02 PM.
Looks like that trough is going East of us.
see the bolded, the quoted costs are wholesale market costs and haven't yet been passed on to customers. but energy retailers want to.
https://www.expressnews.com/business...t-18563589.php“I know that on our end we’re very much concerned about costs to the market, whatever they may be,” she said. “We have pe ions sitting at the PUC right now where independent retailers … want to pass those costs … to consumers outside of the fixed-rate contract.”
Grid experts and ERCOT’s independent monitor have been warning about the possibility of some of the program’s costs trickling down to customers’ bills if ERCOT doesn’t change how it buys and uses power for the reserve program it launched in August to shore up grid reliability. It came in response to the near collapse of the power grid during Winter Storm Uri in February 2021.
The problem, according to Potomac Economics, the company currently contracted as the independent market monitor, is that when ERCOT moves power into the new reserve program for use in case of emergency, it’s removed from the regular market. Such “quarantining” of available power creates the appearance of shortages though there’s actually plenty available. That, in turn, drives up the cost of power on the market.
As demand soared to records through this summer’s record heat, that meant utilities across the state paid from $8 billion to as much as $12.5 billion more than they would have without the program in place, according to Potomac’s analysis.
reportedly ERCOT declined to make any representative present to the public. seems like they missed a chance to say, "situation normal, we're prepared, everything is gonna be cool."
and, be aware of grid conditions @ERCOT_ISO
They know how it will play out
Shame on you, bene.
Rafael will be in Cancun so does it matter?
it's probably nbd, but ERCOT notably isn't projecting confidence, which it is surely is free to do.
LOL only ~500 MW reserve being normal
Looks like the grid is holding. Of course this trough is later in the year. We get another trough closer to the solstice and it would be a disaster. This is the new seasonal reality.
Bend over, I'll give ya a in' trough, Lumps. What'd you do on our sojourn? I reloaded my poison pen & ate like a gov't mule.
...you bent over a yard arm when it breaks off. & you should've never posted that information on here, ya damn , you.
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