Electricity prices to shutdown casinos during the arctic plunge?
Quote: Hunterhillmost wood pellet stoves also require electricity that’s why I went with a wood stove.
Yes, the ones that I have seen have an electronic igniter. I would guess that the pellet feeder timer is also electric.
Quote: gamerfreak
What ever happened to indoor kerosine heaters? Weren’t they all the rage 30-40+ years ago?
They're still around. I had 3 of them in
the 80's, man they produce a lot of
heat. Expensive to run though. When
I had the cab co in certain neighborhoods
I had to go to the door. In the winter a
blast of hot air would hit me and they
had their furnace cranked and the
inevitable huge kero heater in the
middle of the living room. Was 90
in there at least.
Dyna Glo 23k Btu Indoor Kerosene Heater - Black
$134.00 in-store pickup only
Walmart link: https://tinyurl.com/ybkut9f2
Klean-Strip® 1-K Kerosene Heater Fuel, 2.5 Gallons
$21.68 ($8.67/gal)
Only 1 left! - in-store pickup only
WalMart link: https://tinyurl.com/ydgdyhvp
I ordered a small one just to see how they look and work.
Quote: AxelWolfI have been looking at bio-ethanol indoor fireplaces
My bedroom heat tonight.
Don't they have gas mains, or is too demanding to expect them not to be outmoded, just like a third world country?Quote: ChumpChange"Backup generators at towers are freezing or running out of fuel or both," tweeted County Judge KP George.
One-third of Texas power grid officials do not live in Texas: report - Raw Story - Celebrating 16 Years of Independent Journalism https://www.rawstory.com/one-third-texas-power-officials/
Texas has a new crisis compounding blackouts — natural gas is ‘just frozen right now’: GOP governor - Raw Story - Celebrating 16 Years of Independent Journalism https://www.rawstory.com/texas-power-outage-blackout-gas/
No warmup until Sunday the 21st.
Can anyone verify!?
Quote: SOOPOONot sure if I understand this. I ‘think’ my electric bill is a defined rate approved by some government agency, multiplied by how much I use? And if the utility wants a raise, it requests it from the government agency, maybe like once a year? I ‘think’ I don’t pay a different rate today versus tomorrow?
Can anyone verify!?
Where are you now? Florida? If so, you've got it right. But in, say, Buffalo there are options for variable rate pricing. It's cheaper over time, but when it spikes.....
Now you just need some soft music, wine and a bubble bath.Quote: EvenBobMy bedroom heat tonight.
Candles igniting curtain cause of fire at Cosmopolitan
Quote: EvenBobMy bedroom heat tonight.
That set up looks like waiting for an altar boy to come light the rest of them lol.
Quote: mcallister3200Quote: EvenBobMy bedroom heat tonight.
That set up looks like waiting for an altar boy to come light the rest of them lol.
Probably is, it's a stock photo
I found on the net.
there won't be any need for candle heat then.Quote: mcallister3200Quote: EvenBobMy bedroom heat tonight.
That set up looks like waiting for an altar boy to come light the rest of them lol.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/real-size-texas-blackouts-could-have-plunged-15-million-people-darkness
Nearly all of Houston has low -- or no -- water pressure, OEM says
Water utilities are being impacted by the state power issues.
https://tinyurl.com/ycxt48fg
Fires started by candles or burning other things for heat met with 911 backlogs and fire crews with inadequate water pressure.
(Another few days of this and cities will burn down like Chicago did way back when.)
Quote: ChumpChange
Fires started by candles
I burned 12 candles last night and
survived. Amazing feat.
Quote: EvenBobI burned 12 candles last night and
survived. Amazing feat.
Bob... I missed the beginning... Do you use candles as your main source of heat? Or mostly decorative? Do you also use ‘regular’ furnace? Or fireplace?
I burned one space heater last night and almost died.Quote: EvenBobI burned 12 candles last night and
survived. Amazing feat.
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/texas-was-seconds-and-minutes-complete-disaster
TV says more cold weather coming tonight and more rotating blackouts are likely.
3.3 million are under a boil water order because the water pressure fell below 20 psi. It was reported to be 30 psi a few hours ago. I need 50 psi myself.
Burst pipes will be worse than Flint, MI.
Federal supplies have arrived but state officials haven't done anything with them, eg generators and fuel.
Quote: ChumpChangeElectric prices could double, quadruple, 10X, or 100X imminently because of supply problems in the deep freeze. Will casinos close (especially in the midwest & east) because the electric bill just went off the charts?
No word on when prices will recover, but it's not this week, and prices will continue to skyrocket. Texans could be paying $5-$10 per kilowatt-hour today, and multiples of that by the end of this week.
For a low user on 20 kw-hr/day, that'd be $100-$200 a day for electricity now.
"Homeowners hit with electric bills as high as $17K amid Texas winter storm" - NY Post
Quote: Tanko"Homeowners hit with electric bills as high as $17K amid Texas winter storm" - NY Post
17k or freeze to death?
Might be worth spending a couple nights sleeping in the car with the motor on. With the garage door open of course.
Quote:To pay all operation, maintenance and replacement costs (including interest expense and repayment of investments) to meet the requirements of the project. The cost of construction completed and in service by 1937 was repaid from power revenues by May 31, 1987, except for costs relating to flood control. Repayment of the $25 million construction costs allocated to flood control will be repaid by 2037. Any features added after May 31, 1987 will be repaid within 50 years of the date of installation or as established by Congress. In addition, Arizona and Nevada each receive $300,000 annually in lieu of taxes.
Quote: SOOPOOCan you spell ‘class action lawsuit’? I just don’t see customers paying the ridiculous electric bills. And I expect them to be protected by the government.
Not a chance. It's a fully open market. Even the residential customers *must* buy from a retailer. They sign contracts, and contracts for variable rates include disclosure statements about the risks. In broad terms, those residential customers could have paid $0.08/kwh under a fully fixed price. They picked a variable rate. That rate is $0.065/kwh...unless it's $9/kwh instead.
Quote: rdw4potusNot a chance. It's a fully open market. Even the residential customers *must* buy from a retailer. They sign contracts, and contracts for variable rates include disclosure statements about the risks. In broad terms, those residential customers could have paid $0.08/kwh under a fully fixed price. They picked a variable rate. That rate is $0.065/kwh...unless it's $9/kwh instead.
Wanna bet the guy with the $17k bill doesn’t pay the bill? It’s an open market... until the government decides you are price gouging.
Quote: SOOPOOWanna bet the guy with the $17k bill doesn’t pay the bill? It’s an open market... until the government decides you are price gouging.
But it is demonstrably not price gouging. Power prices are set by the market as a whole. It isn't as though NRG decided to kick John Doe in the nuts for sport. The exchange cleared price for all customers in John's town was published in advance and cleared at $9/kwh. John also exercised free will and signed a contract that specified the risks he was taking. All that said, the bill could go unpaid, sure. The consumer would be reported to credit agencies for non payment, and his power would be turned off until the debt was paid. But he could fail to pay, sure.
The residential bills are gonna take all the spotlight. But the commercial and industrial costs are going to be so much worse. I have a customer who has on-site natural gas fired backup generation. They went through the week alternating between $9/kwh grid power, $15/kwhe gas-fired gen, and failure when gas pressure failed and the grid was blacked out. That's gonna be 2 8 figure bills + the cost of spoilage from when they were offline.
Quote: rdw4potusBut it is demonstrably not price gouging. Power prices are set by the market as a whole. It isn't as though NRG decided to kick John Doe in the nuts for sport. The exchange cleared price for all customers in John's town was published in advance and cleared at $9/kwh. John also exercised free will and signed a contract that specified the risks he was taking. All that said, the bill could go unpaid, sure. The consumer would be reported to credit agencies for non payment, and his power would be turned off until the debt was paid. But he could fail to pay, sure.
The residential bills are gonna take all the spotlight. But the commercial and industrial costs are going to be so much worse. I have a customer who has on-site natural gas fired backup generation. They went through the week alternating between $9/kwh grid power, $15/kwhe gas-fired gen, and failure when gas pressure failed and the grid was blacked out. That's gonna be 2 8 figure bills + the cost of spoilage from when they were offline.
I understand people signed contracts. Are you aware of the MILLIONS of people that signed rental agreements that are now LEGALLY just not paying and can’t be evicted, because of the COVID-19 ‘emergency’. Expect a similar occurrence with this. No one will have their power turned off because of non payment from this situation. There will be a Governor’s emergency executive order, followed by some state legislation. And since it is a big bad utility, no one will care about the signed contracts they can show.
Quote: SOOPOOI understand people signed contracts. Are you aware of the MILLIONS of people that signed rental agreements that are now LEGALLY just not paying and can’t be evicted, because of the COVID-19 ‘emergency’. Expect a similar occurrence with this. No one will have their power turned off because of non payment from this situation. There will be a Governor’s emergency executive order, followed by some state legislation. And since it is a big bad utility, no one will care about the signed contracts they can show.
Here is a report of a Texas electric company that already took $6k out of someone's bank account. I'm guessing they had it set up on auto-pay: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/us/texas-storm-electric-bills.html
It is one thing to walk out on a bill and not give money to the power companies. To get them to pay back money they've already received is a whole other issue.
Quote: SOOPOOI understand people signed contracts. Are you aware of the MILLIONS of people that signed rental agreements that are now LEGALLY just not paying and can’t be evicted, because of the COVID-19 ‘emergency’. Expect a similar occurrence with this. No one will have their power turned off because of non payment from this situation. There will be a Governor’s emergency executive order, followed by some state legislation. And since it is a big bad utility, no one will care about the signed contracts they can show.
It's not a utility. It's a retail marketer. Or, several dozen of them really. If it was a utility, the costs could be amortized and pushed to the rate base over time. Thats a sane model, so you know darn well Texas did it differently.
And power gets cut in Texas for non payment all the time. Of my 15,000 customer accounts in TX, a handful are off at any given time because of late payment of normally sized bills. Larger a/r exposure isn't going to slow that process.
Greg Abbott owes his whole career to the energy industry. He's not really in a position to screw them now. Especially when the grid's pricing mechanism worked exactly as designed. It has a cap. That's $9000/mwh. It's the highest in the country by far because everything is bigger in Texas. There was an emergency event. The cap was reached. Now, of course the people who participated in that market have to pay. They enjoyed the nation's lowest rates for a decade between calamities. Hopefully they accrued some of those savings.
Utilities run both Short-Term and Long Term Load Forecasts. The STLF is an hourly forecast covering the next 7 days. The LTLF is for the next one to ten years. The purpose of the LTLF is to allow informed decision making about both fuel purchases and scheduling of generation plant maintenance. The purpose of the STLF is to ensure sufficient capacity is spun-up and ready to bring on-line quickly (depending on the type of generator it can take hours to weeks to bring a generator on-line). The key point is that unless there has been some completely unpredictable event, having insufficient capacity is an indicator of poor planning (i.e., you did a crappy forecast, you ignored the forecast and cut things too close, or you left this all to somebody else to do while you went golfing). Let's look at all these possibilities.
ERCOT's forecast a/o Nov 2020 states:
Quote: ERCOT“We studied a range of potential risks under both normal and extreme conditions, and believe there is sufficient generation to adequately serve our customers.”
The ERCOT report also states
Quote:The winter SARA includes a unit outage forecast of 8,616 MW during the winter months, which is based on historical winter outage data compiled since 2017
A three year history isn't much, especially considering a point noted in a number of articles that almost exactly a decade ago, in February 2011, Texas suffered a significant series of rolling blackouts when cold weather forced dozens of coal and natural gas power plants offline. In addition to the 2011 cold snap, cold weather events in 1983, 1989, 2003, 2006, and 2010 were all taken into account in FERC's study of the 2011 winter and how well the southwest power grid handled it. Also, while a number of news stories and politicians have focused on this being a such an extreme low temperature, that's not necessarily relevant. The real question is how often temperatures fall below a threshold that will impact the grid. If temperatures below 32 F (i.e., freezing) are the trigger point, the fact that the temperature was -2 in Dallas, although it will make a bad situation worse, isn't that relevant in so far as grid reliability.
Bottom line: this was not an event that was so unexpected that no competent capacity planner should have been surprised by it.
Next, also regarding capacity planning (from Wikipedia):
Quote:The NERC's 2019 Summer Reliability Assessment report found that ERCOT grid had one of the United States' lowest anticipated reserve margins (i.e., the margin of unused electric generating capacity during peak load). The report found that ERCOT was the sole part of the country without sufficient resources available to meet projected peak electricity demand in summertime.
In other words, ERCOT has a history of cutting things close.
Finally, regarding the last possibility I mentioned (i.e., you left this all to somebody else to do while you went golfing) I believe that this might have been a big part of the problem due to the way the power grid in Texas has been deregulated. Once upon a time (i.e., when I was working in this field) the power grid was similar to the telcom grid before AT&T was broken up. The power grid has 3 components: generation, transmission, and distribution. In any given part of the country, from the POV of the consumer, all 3 used to be handled by a single utility. Each service area had an incumbent utility that did a forecast of expected demand for all of it's customers and then scheduled it's generation capacity and bulk power purchases accordingly. But that was in the old days before deregulation. From Wikipedia;
Quote:Texas power consumers (those served by a company not owned by a municipality or a utility cooperative) could choose their electricity service from a variety of retail electric providers (REPs), including the incumbent utility. The incumbent utility in the area still owns and maintains the local power lines (and is the company to call in the event of a power outage) and was not subject to deregulation. Customers served by cooperatives or municipal utilities could choose an alternate REP only if the utility has opted in to deregulation;........
Since 2002, approximately 85% of commercial and industrial consumers have switched power providers at least once. Approximately 40% of residential consumers in deregulated areas have switched from the former incumbent provider to a competitive REP.
What this means is that each REP would be responsible for ensuring that they have sufficient generating capacity for their customers. But the REPs are supplying the power via the shared pool of transmission and distribution lines. That means that, due to the physics of power generation/transmission, if one REP screws up it can have an impact on all customers in that service area. Now I have to state that the problem of running a deregulated grid is one I have not had any experience with as it happened after I had moved on but it's got to be a bitch. The greater the number of links in the chain, the greater the opportunity for some problem. And when there is a supply/demand issue who is on the hook to fix it ASAP: the REP, the incumbent utility, or ERCOT?
I've seen a number of stories addressing how utilities plan for this kind of extreme weather but the focus is mostly on the infrastructure engineering required (e.g., well-head heaters). None of this complexity re the division of responsibilities is mentioned. In fact, the word deregulation frequently doesn't even appear in these article.s In my opinion, deregulation was a large part of the problem. The REPs are operating in a competitive environment, all vying for the same customers. Electricity isn't something that you sell like cars or clothes: it all looks the same and provides the same functionality. The only way you can compete is based on price (if this was for example, Vermont, you could probably get a share of the market power from selling green power but we're talking here about Texas). At the same time, deregulation has also turned power generation into a competitive (i.e., profit-oriented) business. This is as opposed to the old days when it was utilities were a dull but safe investment. The utility commissions promised to set rates to allow a modest but guaranteed profit margin while the utilities promised to provide reliable power. Back then, utilities were run by engineers. Now they're run by hedge funds. This means that cutting operating overhead and capital expenditures is much more important to a REP then maintaining reliability.
The end result is that a statement like "Utilities work year-round to harden the grid against extreme weather" is in Texas no longer as true as it once was. The FERC study mentioned previously identified all the problems currently impacting the ability of the Texas grid to meet demand. The weaknesses still exist so the bottom line here seems to be that nobody wanted to spend the necessary money to harden the infrastructure.
So at this point we've concluded that:
- ERCOT did a poor job of forecasting demand
- ERCOT wasn't doing enough to make sure it had sufficient spare capacity in peak situations
- a decentralized /deregulated architecture increased the odds of one or more suppliers (i.e., REP) failing to generate the power their customers would need
Now at this point the final nail gets driven into the coffin and, in this case, it's one that seem to get mentioned in a lot of the news coverage. One form of insurance that utilities use is participation in the regional power grids. Insufficient generation capacity in one part of the country can be compensated for by buying power on the spot market from somewhere else. This, apparently, is the main reason that Oklahoma hasn't been impacted the way Texas has. Participation in the Southwest Power Pool reduced the scope and duration of any weather-induced outages. Texas, as everybody probably knows by now, is not part of any regional pool and the result of this "avoid Federal regulations at all cost" approach is now obvious.
I've seen a lot of news stories where they highlight the isolation of the Texas grid with statements like "Texas is an island in the US electrical system" but I think a more accurate metaphor is that it's an isolated archipelago made up of many small islands, each run by a clique of greedy and incompetent rulers.
p.s. a good web site for seeing in real-time the state of the entire US power grid is PowerOutage.us
Quote: TumblingBones[TLDR]
Utilities run both Short-Term and Long Term Load Forecasts. The STLF is an hourly forecast covering the next 7 days. The LTLF is for the next one to ten years. The purpose of the LTLF is to allow informed decision making about both fuel purchases and scheduling of generation plant maintenance. The purpose of the STLF is to ensure sufficient capacity is spun-up and ready to bring on-line quickly (depending on the type of generator it can take hours to weeks to bring a generator on-line). The key point is that unless there has been some completely unpredictable event, having insufficient capacity is an indicator of poor planning (i.e., you did a crappy forecast, you ignored the forecast and cut things too close, or you left this all to somebody else to do while you went golfing). Let's look at all these possibilities.
ERCOT's forecast a/o Nov 2020 states:
The ERCOT report also states
A three year history isn't much, especially considering a point noted in a number of articles that almost exactly a decade ago, in February 2011, Texas suffered a significant series of rolling blackouts when cold weather forced dozens of coal and natural gas power plants offline. In addition to the 2011 cold snap, cold weather events in 1983, 1989, 2003, 2006, and 2010 were all taken into account in FERC's study of the 2011 winter and how well the southwest power grid handled it. Also, while a number of news stories and politicians have focused on this being a such an extreme low temperature, that's not necessarily relevant. The real question is how often temperatures fall below a threshold that will impact the grid. If temperatures below 32 F (i.e., freezing) are the trigger point, the fact that the temperature was -2 in Dallas, although it will make a bad situation worse, isn't that relevant in so far as grid reliability.
Bottom line: this was not an event that was so unexpected that no competent capacity planner should have been surprised by it.
Next, also regarding capacity planning (from Wikipedia):
In other words, ERCOT has a history of cutting things close.
Finally, regarding the last possibility I mentioned (i.e., you left this all to somebody else to do while you went golfing) I believe that this might have been a big part of the problem due to the way the power grid in Texas has been deregulated. Once upon a time (i.e., when I was working in this field) the power grid was similar to the telcom grid before AT&T was broken up. The power grid has 3 components: generation, transmission, and distribution. In any given part of the country, from the POV of the consumer, all 3 used to be handled by a single utility. Each service area had an incumbent utility that did a forecast of expected demand for all of it's customers and then scheduled it's generation capacity and bulk power purchases accordingly. But that was in the old days before deregulation. From Wikipedia;
What this means is that each REP would be responsible for ensuring that they have sufficient generating capacity for their customers. But the REPs are supplying the power via the shared pool of transmission and distribution lines. That means that, due to the physics of power generation/transmission, if one REP screws up it can have an impact on all customers in that service area. Now I have to state that the problem of running a deregulated grid is one I have not had any experience with as it happened after I had moved on but it's got to be a bitch. The greater the number of links in the chain, the greater the opportunity for some problem. And when there is a supply/demand issue who is on the hook to fix it ASAP: the REP, the incumbent utility, or ERCOT?
I've seen a number of stories addressing how utilities plan for this kind of extreme weather but the focus is mostly on the infrastructure engineering required (e.g., well-head heaters). None of this complexity re the division of responsibilities is mentioned. In fact, the word deregulation frequently doesn't even appear in these article.s In my opinion, deregulation was a large part of the problem. The REPs are operating in a competitive environment, all vying for the same customers. Electricity isn't something that you sell like cars or clothes: it all looks the same and provides the same functionality. The only way you can compete is based on price (if this was for example, Vermont, you could probably get a share of the market power from selling green power but we're talking here about Texas). At the same time, deregulation has also turned power generation into a competitive (i.e., profit-oriented) business. This is as opposed to the old days when it was utilities were a dull but safe investment. The utility commissions promised to set rates to allow a modest but guaranteed profit margin while the utilities promised to provide reliable power. Back then, utilities were run by engineers. Now they're run by hedge funds. This means that cutting operating overhead and capital expenditures is much more important to a REP then maintaining reliability.
The end result is that a statement like "Utilities work year-round to harden the grid against extreme weather" is in Texas no longer as true as it once was. The FERC study mentioned previously identified all the problems currently impacting the ability of the Texas grid to meet demand. The weaknesses still exist so the bottom line here seems to be that nobody wanted to spend the necessary money to harden the infrastructure.
So at this point we've concluded that:
- ERCOT did a poor job of forecasting demand
- ERCOT wasn't doing enough to make sure it had sufficient spare capacity in peak situations
- a decentralized /deregulated architecture increased the odds of one or more suppliers (i.e., REP) failing to generate the power their customers would need
Now at this point the final nail gets driven into the coffin and, in this case, it's one that seem to get mentioned in a lot of the news coverage. One form of insurance that utilities use is participation in the regional power grids. Insufficient generation capacity in one part of the country can be compensated for by buying power on the spot market from somewhere else. This, apparently, is the main reason that Oklahoma hasn't been impacted the way Texas has. Participation in the Southwest Power Pool reduced the scope and duration of any weather-induced outages. Texas, as everybody probably knows by now, is not part of any regional pool and the result of this "avoid Federal regulations at all cost" approach is now obvious.
I've seen a lot of news stories where they highlight the isolation of the Texas grid with statements like "Texas is an island in the US electrical system" but I think a more accurate metaphor is that it's an isolated archipelago made up of many small islands, each run by a clique of greedy and incompetent rulers.
p.s. a good web site for seeing in real-time the state of the entire US power grid is PowerOutage.us
I just wanted to say that this post was terrific and I learned a lot of interesting stuff from it, thank you.
Quote: TumblingBonesGlad lessons learned in my misspent youth has proved beneficial in some way.
Since I didn't learn anything from my own misspent youth, I might as well learn from someone else's.
Quote: SOOPOORdw4potus... you clearly know more about the energy industry than I do, and more about Texas than I do. Maybe I know more about politicians than you do, and I expect them to ‘protect’ their constituents from those ‘unethical, greedy, mercenaries’! Once it makes the news....
Omg, exhusband-of-soopoo, you might be right. It never occurred to me that the federal government might be the entity that stepped in to provide payment assistance. There is next-to-0 federal oversight of the power market in Texas as a result of Texas's careful design. Texas worked very hard to limit federal involvement when the system was mostly working well. If federal emergency assistance funds can be used to pay these bills, well, wow.
So it begins . . .
In just 13 more posts, you can share your research with us. I expect it will be very interesting.Quote: marcel55Yeah same here. But you know we could learn more and share ideas. It will help us to learn more about this and others can also learn. So when you are about to do the research?
Almost every post is vague, about nothing almost, usually difficult to even relate to any thread, the context is almost non-existent if not non-existent.Quote: unJonIn just 13 more posts, you can share your research with us. I expect it will be very interesting.
Brazos Electric Power Cooperative filing for Chapter 11 the same day the state's attorney general announced a lawsuit against another power provider.
NBC News link: https://tinyurl.com/yc3onccu
Oldest Texas electricity co-op goes bust after getting hit with $2 billion bill
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brazos-electric-power-cooperative-bankruptcy-texas/
Quote: ChumpChange
Brazos Electric Power Cooperative filing for Chapter 11
Isn't that right across the county
line from BillyBob's BBQ Joint
& Electric Company? Texas, good
grief..
