REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

The Texas Disaster

POSTED BY: JEWELSTAITEFAN
UPDATED: Wednesday, January 17, 2024 11:01
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Friday, April 2, 2021 5:48 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Analysis reveals 194 died in Texas cold storm and blackouts, almost double the official count

by Zach Despart, Alejandro Serrano, Stephanie Lamm
Updated: April 1, 2021 2:45 p.m.

The deaths of nearly 200 people are linked to February’s cold snap and blackouts, a Houston Chronicle analysis reveals, making the natural disaster one of the worst in Texas this past century.

The tally, which is nearly double the state’s official count, comes from an investigation of reports from medical examiners, justices of the peace and Department of State Health Services, as well as lawsuits and news stories.

The state count, which is preliminary, has yet to incorporate some deaths already flagged by medical examiners as storm-related.

The 194 deaths identified by the Chronicle so far include at least 100 cases of hypothermia that killed people in their homes or while exposed to the elements, at least 16 carbon monoxide poisonings of residents who used dangerous methods for heat and at least 22 Texans who died when medical devices failed without power or who were unable to seek live-saving care because of the weather.

Sixteen deaths were from other causes, such as fires or vehicle wrecks, while the remaining 40 were attributed by authorities to the storm without listing a specific cause.

“This is almost double the death toll from Hurricane Harvey,” said State Rep. Rafael Anchia, D-Dallas. “There was no live footage of flooded homes, or roofs being blown off, or tidal surges, but this was more deadly and devastating than anything we’ve experienced in modern state history.”

The toll is almost certain to grow in coming weeks as death investigators in the state’s most populous counties clear a backlog in cases from the cold snap. The Travis County medical examiner alone is investigating more than 80 deaths between Feb. 13 and Feb. 20.

Days-long blackouts are “unheard of” in developed countries, said José Aguilar, a U.S.-based utilities expert working to repair Venezuela’s power grid after mismanagement and underinvestment led to an electricity crisis two year ago. All grids have flaws, he said, but Texas leaders failed to heed warnings from past outages to make the state’s system more resilient.

Jason Enia, a disaster expert at Sam Houston State University, said political will for bold reforms fades quickly after a crisis. A blackout death toll that slowly ticks upward does not have the same galvanizing effect on the public psyche as the immediate devastation of a hurricane, he said.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210402011915/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/texas-cold-storm-200-died-analysis-winter-freeze-16070470.php


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, April 4, 2021 8:49 AM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


We merely ask our leaders for competence. We ask that your policies stop killing people.

By The Editorial Board of the Houston Chronicles

Texans long ago became accustomed to floods and droughts, wildfires and heat waves. Mass shootings, major plane crashes, tornadoes and random chemical explosions. They’ve all been mixed into the bitter cup from which we’ve sipped.

But it’s been generations — decade upon decade — since this state has seen anything like the death toll that February’s winter storm has wrought. Not since nearly 600 people died in the 1947 Texas City explosion have so many Texans been sent so suddenly to their graves — more than in Hurricanes Harvey and Ike combined. More than Tropical Storm Allison, which killed 55 Texans in 2001. More than in the 1953 Waco tornadoes, which exceeded 100 deaths. More than the 137 who died in the 1985 crash of Delta Airlines Flight 135 at the Dallas airport. More than the 15 who died in the chemical plant explosion that devastated the tiny town of West.

Those few days this past February, when the mercury plummeted and our energy sources quickly followed suit, and men, women and children died in their beds, will go down in history not just as one of Texas’ deadliest disasters, taking nearly 200 lives by latest counting, but also as a sort of reckoning for this state of neglect that passes for government.

In the same way that the pandemic’s grim toll on Texas — nearly 50,000 lives lost statewide — exposed holes in our public health system, the storm shined a light on Texas’ broken governance. Our elected leaders, with their shortsighted policies on everything from electric deregulation to air quality to caring for foster children, the mentally ill and the uninsured, leave us in a state perpetually teetering on the brink of crisis. They’re hedging their bets with our lives, in the name of conservative principle.

What is conservative about saving us a few dollars on taxes and electricity bills if some of us end up paying with our lives? What is fiscally responsible about a system of energy generation that allows industry to profit from crisis while millions of Texas households and businesses are stuck with the bills: lost pay, lost revenue, exorbitant electric bills?

We’d like to say that the winter storm that led to February’s historic blackout represented a long-awaited winter for Texas leaders’ recklessness. We’d like to believe that legislative efforts in Austin to respond to the storm represent some kind of awakening, a Texas Spring, if you will, of responsible policymaking.

But a few seeds of goodwill and promises of reform do not a revolution make.

And yes, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, we agree with you that Texas needs to “revolutionize” the system that fuels the power grid and supplies energy to our homes. But we need a broader revolution in the way our elected officials view their jobs. We’re not asking for far-left fantasies of compassion and equity — not today, anyway.

For the purposes of this moment, this editorial, we’ll define our revolutionary demands in the humblest of terms.

Competence. We merely ask for competence. We ask that your policies stop killing people — whether they be mentally ill patients trapped on waiting lists for scarce hospital beds or vulnerable Texans whose medical devices need a reliable power grid to keep them alive.

The number of Texans who died now stands at 194, close to twice the official tally. The larger total was determined by a troop of Houston Chronicle journalists, who dug through news accounts, death records and coroner’s reports.

Of the nearly 200 dead, at least 100 died of hypothermia. Yes, in the year 2021, they died of the cold, and often in their own homes shuddering to death while Texas’ much-hyped independent power grid came within “minutes or seconds” of absolute, weeks-long collapse. Sadly, the number is not complete. The Austin medical examiner’s office is investigating another 80 deaths the week of the storm, and other inquiries continue across the Lone Star State.

But as it stands the count includes 16 who died of carbon monoxide poisoning even as they turned to desperate and dangerous ways of keeping warm. Twenty-two Texans whose lives depended on medical devices lost them during the storm, as their powered-off machines went still.

Texans, if we can’t keep our children alive in their beds, we’re not worthy of the pride we heap on this place we love.

Texas itself — this great, powerful, innovative state we call home — needs a serious physical, and we’re seeing no signs it has even made an appointment with a doctor.

Our diagnosis would begin with the idea among some in Republican leadership that our state government need do little more than put out a shiny welcome mat and hold open the door for employers to relocate here, bringing jobs and money with them.

The simplistic idea, championed by every governor since at least Democrat Ann Richards left office, and reinforced by Republican majorities in the state House and Senate, and by all nine members of the Texas Supreme Court, is that if we can keep the cost of doing business here low, then job-creators will come to Texas and stay.

Have they come? Indeed. And they’ve brought jobs. But what Texas leaders miss amid their boasting is that nobody wants to live in a place where their kids can’t breathe clean air, where they struggle to find an educated workforce, where their aging parents might die in a dayslong power outage.

When nobody’s watching out enough for our water and air, it gets polluted. And energy infrastructure, overseen by agencies whose top priorities seem to be keeping the energy markets happy, gets neglected.

Such neglect, deadly as we have seen, is a crime — or it ought to be.

As much as these numbers are a rude awakening, they are also a welcome antidote to that most natural of inclinations — the desire to move on. The weather in Texas is warming our shoulders and, in that annual miracle of growth, teasing the budding bluebonnets out of the ground.

They come too just as Christians the world over are celebrating Easter Sunday, that time of hope which arrives with flowers and liturgy and Sunday dress, full of ham and family and, perhaps in vaccinated families, hugs.

But the full Easter story is about more than hope. It’s about sacrifice and death, too. Before the surprise at the empty tomb, came Gethsemane and the garden of doubt, the pain of the cross, and loneliness of Calvary.

Houston, we’ve been through a passion of our own this past year. Let us now commit to earn if not salvation, a bit of sanctuary. That starts by recognizing that our pain this past winter was born not of the cruelty of Mother Nature, but of the folly of man.

The good news is that what man has destroyed, he is capable of repairing — if he can only be bothered to see the need.

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Editorial-
Nearly-200-dead-Winter-storm-exposes-16073890.php

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, April 12, 2021 7:43 AM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Since the February power outages, Texas legislators have been busy weighing a host of improvements for the state’s grid, from weatherizing equipment to shaking up oversight to partnering with the billionaire investor Warren Buffett on new emergency-use power plants.

But hardly any of them have focused on what some believe could be a more widespread fix: plugging into other U.S. power supplies.

While Texas has long opposed opening its grid to avoid federal oversight, and ostensibly to keep prices low, energy experts say the calculus is not what it once was and that the benefits of connecting to the outside world are at least worth examining, especially as renewable energy is poised for a major expansion under the Biden administration.

Not only is the state missing out on a potential lifeline in future blackouts, they warn, it also risks passing up billions of dollars in new investments for clean, marketable electricity.

“We export every form of energy you could imagine except electrons,” Michael Webber, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told reporters recently. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “Let’s at least study the option.”

Though a more integrated grid would probably not have prevented outages in February— surrounding states were also struggling to meet demand — it could have helped shorten them substantially, according to Dan Cohan, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University.

The blackouts left 4.5 million Texans without power and water for days and contributed to at least 197 deaths.

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/An-open-Texas-
power-grid-would-boost-reliability-16090160.php

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, April 12, 2021 10:25 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


That's how they get you.

Free shit offered up front that your grandkid's will be paying for.


Hopefully Puerto Rico knows that too and declines our "generous" offer for statehood whenever that comes up. They'll have Disneyland San Juan in the first decade and their entire history and culture will be destroyed.

--------------------------------------------------

Imagine the hypocrisy of a government who will allow businesses to card people to get a job or buy groceries, but won't card people to vote in elections and gives millions of non-citizens free money from taxpayers.

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Monday, April 12, 2021 12:05 PM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That's how they get you.

Free shit offered up front that your grandkid's will be paying for.


Hopefully Puerto Rico knows that too and declines our "generous" offer for statehood whenever that comes up. They'll have Disneyland San Juan in the first decade and their entire history and culture will be destroyed.
I checked and discovered that Congress does NOT have to ask Puerto Ricans for their permission before making the island a state. However, Congress has often followed a more complicated process. For many admitted states, Congress first passed an Enabling Act, which authorized the population of a territory to convene a constitutional convention to draft a constitution for the new proposed state, and to apply for admission to Congress. Often in the Enabling Act, Congress specified a range of conditions that the proposed state had to meet in order for admission to occur. These conditions varied widely across time and states. For example, some states were precluded from allowing polygamy or slavery, and some states were forced to practice religious toleration or to afford civil jury trial rights. Once the proposed state constitution was drafted, it was sent to Congress, which then decided whether to pass an additional act or resolution admitting the state. One variation in the Enabling Act process involved Congress delegating the final approval process to the President.

https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/interpretation
/article-iv/clauses/46

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, April 12, 2021 3:26 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


Looks like Libtards are still pushing for more Windmills, Solar Panels, Electric cars - all of which did not function when they were needed.

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Monday, April 12, 2021 4:09 PM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Looks like Libtards are still pushing for more Windmills, Solar Panels, Electric cars - all of which did not function when they were needed.
Baytown, Texas, gets its power from NRG Cedar Bayou Power Plant on the edge of town. During the blackout, the plant wasn't running because it wasn't receiving any natural gas. That was because the power had been foolishly shut off to the natural gas pipeline compressors in order to conserve electricity. Big, dumb mistake. It was really that simple and stupid, but the politicians wanted to mislead the public about the real cause of the blackout.

Map to NRG Cedar Bayou Power Plant: https://goo.gl/maps/PgdYzUrnvqyJsA696

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, April 26, 2021 7:24 AM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


$16 Billion "Pricing Error" - Ha, Ha, Ha, Suckers Who Will Be Forced To Pay says the GOP!

Highly-criticized decision to leave electricity prices at $9,000 per megawatt hour for 32 hours after the outages stopped — 300 times higher than pre-storm prices — led to what an independent market monitor described as a $16 billion “pricing error”.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott dispatched a top aide to the ERCOT operations center on the night the grid operator made the controversial decision to leave electricity prices at maximum levels — a move blamed for creating a multi-billion dollar mess.

Abbott has squarely placed the blame for the blackout boondoggle on ERCOT, which operates the power grid, and called for its CEO to resign right after the lights started coming back on across Texas on Thursday, Feb. 18. The ERCOT board eventually fired its CEO.

Unmentioned while Abbott was distancing himself from the power outage fiasco and railing against ERCOT on TV: a top energy policy adviser, Ryland Ramos, spent the previous night — and into early Thursday morning — at the agency’s operations center in Taylor, outside of Austin. That’s where ERCOT’s high-tech control room, handling the flow of power to most Texans, is located.

Also on hand at the previously undisclosed meeting were Public Utility Commission Chair DeAnn Walker, an Abbott appointee who later resigned under bipartisan pressure, along with representatives of four of the major electric transmission and distribution companies in Texas.

Ramos returned to the operations center Friday morning, February 19 — right after the price cap was lifted — and stayed there most of the day, according to ERCOT visitor logs obtained by Hearst Newspapers.

Abbott spokesman Mark Miner said neither the governor nor Ramos “were involved in any way” in the decision to keep prices at the maximum, which contributed to bankruptcies and billions in losses that will reverberate in the Texas economy for years to come. He said Abbott wanted Ramos at the operations center because he felt ERCOT was spewing “disinformation” about the crisis. (Actually it was the governor spewing disinformation but he won't admit to it because there was $16 billion changing hands. The governor does not wish that money be returned to its rightful owners. Fearing being sued, the Houston Chronicle won't call the governor a clever crook, yet he is.)

Ramos was “in the room relaying information in real time,” Miner said. “These individuals were working the phones and scrambling to get power back on and keep it on.”

The visitor logs show that Ramos and Walker, along with top regulatory officials from Centerpoint Energy, Oncor, AEP and Texas-New Mexico Power Company — signed in at about 10 p.m. on Wednesday, February 17, and stayed there until 8:49 a.m. the next day. Cots were made available for those who needed to rest as the night wore on, officials said.

The timeline in the visitor logs means the Abbott aide was on the scene when ERCOT decided — just before midnight Wednesday — to quit ordering rolling power outages and then, in the wee hours of Thursday, to leave the maximum prices for electricity in place.

Centerpoint declined comment and referred questions to ERCOT. ONCOR, the state’s largest transmission and distribution company, sent Liz Jones, vice-president of regulatory affairs, to the operations center that night to help officials navigate the grid challenges and manage impacts in ONCOR’s service territory, said spokeswoman Kerri Dunn. AEP and Texas-New Mexico Power Company confirmed they sent representatives to attend the meeting.

Patrick Woodson, CEO of an electric retail provider that is going out of business after getting more than $65 million in bills it couldn’t pay due to the government-ordered price hikes, said the public deserves answers about how and why electricity prices stayed so high for so long — and who all took part in the decision making.

“There’s absolutely no justification whatsoever for prices to have been artificially inflated after the emergency conditions ended. That decision added billions of dollars of extra costs to the market,” Woodson said. “There needs to be a lot more light around how these decisions were made that led to such a massive transfer of wealth.”

$16 billion pricing ‘error’ won’t be corrected

Former utility regulator Arthur D’Andrea, who resigned after he was caught on tape reassuring Wall Street investors that he was working to protect the profits they made during the storm, told a Senate committee in March that ERCOT CEO Bill Magness had the utility commission chair’s blessing to leave the prices unchanged. He said that decision was made at about 1:30 a.m. Thursday.

Magness told the same committee that he left the prices at the maximum level to ensure that generators had the proper incentives to keep the power flowing and also to discourage big electricity users — loath to pay that much — from starting up operations that could potentially overload the grid and start rolling blackouts all over again.

“We needed the maximum incentive to keep every bit of generation on and to keep every bit of load off that was responding to price,” said Magness, whose last day leading ERCOT will be May 3. “And that seemed like the best course we had to assure that we would stay out of rotating outages.”

But the highly-criticized decision to leave electricity prices at $9,000 per megawatt hour for 32 hours after the outages stopped — 300 times higher than pre-storm prices — led to what an independent market monitor described as a $16 billion pricing error, and $3 billion to $5 billion in unwarranted and potentially recoverable overcharges.

It also sparked a public rift between Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who pushed for a repricing bill aimed at undoing some of the damage that occurred over almost a day and a half. Under pressure from the lieutenant governor, seen as a potential Abbott rival, the governor suddenly gave the Legislature emergency powers to reprice but didn’t work the chambers to make it happen and at this point the initiative is dead.

Miner said the ERCOT CEO was the one who made the pricing decision, but the Abbott spokesman said he was unable to answer whether Ramos was in the room at the time — or if he told the governor about it. Nor could Miner say whether Abbott supported the decision, then or now, to leave rates at the cap of $9,000 per megawatt hour.
Abbott refuses to release emails, texts

Abbott has been unrelenting in his criticism of ERCOT, despite his perch at the top of the regulatory org chart: His own appointees on the Public Utility Commission oversee every aspect of ERCOT and all three of his commissioners who oversaw the storm response resigned amid the fury over blackouts that have made the top energy producing state in America a national laughingstock.

Barely two days into the disaster, and just a day before dispatching his aide to the ERCOT Operations Center, the governor tweeted that he was ordering “an investigation into ERCOT and immediate transparency by ERCOT.”

About a month later, though, Abbott’s office refused to release emails, text messages and other communications that he and his own aides — including Ramos, the one who spent the night at the grid operations center — exchanged with representatives of ERCOT and the PUC or that were otherwise related to the power outage and its aftermath.

In their denial of a public information request from Hearst Newspapers for those records, Abbott’s lawyers claimed a number of reasons they should not be disclosed. They say the messages include privileged communications with attorneys, information about secret incentive packages potentially offered to companies willing to expand in Texas and policy-related communications that, if released, would “have a chilling effect on the frank and open discussion necessary for the decision-making process.”

ERCOT provided its visitor logs for the days Winter Storm Uri was bearing down on Texas five days after Hearst requested them.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210426105617/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/politics/texas/article/All-night-ERCOT-meeting-raises-questions-about-16124189.php

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, April 26, 2021 8:50 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
$16 Billion "Pricing Error" - Ha, Ha, Ha, Suckers Who Will Be Forced To Pay says the GOP!


Not seeing how that story has anything to do with the GOP.

They're not getting away with that. You can steal a cookie from the jar here and there, but they took all the cookies.



And aside from that, they used a Democrat Party tactic of trying to change people's behavior by making it too expensive to do what they normally would do. The middle of that catastrophe is not the time to be fucking around like that.

--------------------------------------------------

Imagine the hypocrisy of a government who will allow businesses to card people to get a job or buy groceries, but won't card people to vote in elections and gives millions of non-citizens free money from taxpayers.

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Monday, April 26, 2021 9:17 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
$16 Billion "Pricing Error" - Ha, Ha, Ha, Suckers Who Will Be Forced To Pay says the GOP!


Not seeing how that story has anything to do with the GOP.

They're not getting away with that. You can steal a cookie from the jar here and there, but they took all the cookies.

And aside from that, they used a Democrat Party tactic of trying to change people's behavior by making it too expensive to do what they normally would do. The middle of that catastrophe is not the time to be fucking around like that.
No, it is NOT a Democratic strategy. I was there when the Republicans set up this electric system 20 years ago and all Democrats were opposed because it was obvious what would eventually happen during an emergency.

All the main characters in the news story are Republicans who will receive part of the $16B in loot. All the Republicans deny there was looting and refuse to cooperate in investigating the looting. Hey, it was only $16 billion and the looting was perfectly legal, but voters won't see it that way if they understood the details of this scam and how natural gas industry and the electric generating industry interact. It would take a book to describe what is happening and the voters won't read it, anyway. Because of that the Republicans will get away with the money.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, April 26, 2021 9:19 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Yes it is. Taxing behavior they don't like as a means to get people to stop doing it is a Democrat strategy.

--------------------------------------------------

Imagine the hypocrisy of a government who will allow businesses to card people to get a job or buy groceries, but won't card people to vote in elections and gives millions of non-citizens free money from taxpayers.

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Monday, April 26, 2021 9:47 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Yes it is. Taxing behavior they don't like as a means to get people to stop doing it is a Democrat strategy.
Setting the price of electricity at $9,000 per megawatt-hour was completely the Republicans' idea. The Democrats would use the smart electric meters, which read how much is used every 15 minutes, to decide when smart meter will temporarily disconnect you because of load, the same as the meter will disconnect if you don't pay your monthly bill.
www.texasishot.org/smart-meters/

And cheating Texans out of $16 billion for electricity was a Republican Party idea, which figured that when you divide $16 billion by 29 million Texans it only comes to $550 per person, which the GOP feels it can get away with that theft. The GOP is probably right about getting away with it.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, April 27, 2021 5:55 AM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Vistra, the largest power company in Texas, said it expects to lose as much as $1.2 billion this year after incurring sky-high natural gas costs during the February winter storm. The company previously forecast a profit as high as $860 million for the year.

Vistra said it was forced to spend $1.1 billion on natural gas in the spot market at a price of $700 per million British thermal units during the storm. The typical contract price is about $3 per million British thermal units.

“In one week alone, Vistra spent more than twice the amount on natural gas than what we usually spend in one full year to power our Texas generation fleet,” Vistra CEO Curtis Morgan said.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210426215248/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/business/energy/article/Vistra-forecasts-1-6-billion-financial-hit-from-16129263.php

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, May 2, 2021 5:14 PM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Samsung's Austin fab was offline for more than a month after it was shut down due to power outages during the freeze.

About 71,000 wafers were affected by production disruptions, said Han Jinman, executive vice-president of Samsung’s memory chip business. He estimated the wafer loss is equivalent to $268 million to $357 million.

Semiconductor fabs are typically operational 24 hours a day for years on end. Each batch of wafers — a thin slice of semiconductor used for the fabrication of integrated circuits — can take 45 to 60 days to make, so a shutdown of any length can mean a loss of weeks of work. Restoring a fab is also a complicated process, and even in the best of circumstances can take a week.

The Samsung fab was one of a number of Austin's largest industrial power users that was ordered by the city to idle or shut down operations the week of Feb.15, as millions of Texas homes and businesses lost electricity and the state's power grid came close to a total shutdown.

NXP Semiconductors was also among the facilities that were shut down in February, as its two Austin fabrication facilities were offline for nearly a month. In March, the company estimated the shutdown would result in a $100 million loss in revenue and a month of wafer production.

The product loss and fab shutdown also came as Samsung considers Austin for a significant expansion.

In early February, officials confirmed the region is one of several locations being considered for a more than $17 billion state-of-the-art chip plant. The company is also considering locations including New York and Arizona.

It remains to be seen if the freeze could have an effect on Austin's chances of winning the facility. Company officials declined to comment on whether Central Texas is still under consideration, or when the company might make a decision.

More at https://www.statesman.com/story/business/2021/04/30/austin-fab-shutdow
n-during-texas-freeze-cost-samsung-millions/4891405001/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, May 9, 2021 7:30 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Energy Transfer made $2.4 billion from Texas winter storm, it said Thursday in its first-quarter earnings statement.

Controlled by billionaire Kelcy Warren, the company was sued by CPS Energy, a Texas utility, in the immediate aftermath of the crisis for allegedly charging a natural gas price more than 15,000% higher than normal.

The company joins a growing list of gas market players who reaped windfalls totaling almost $5 billion amid the chaos of the storm. Those with available gas supplies were able to sell at sky-high spot prices.

Kinder Morgan Inc., another pipeline operator, said last month the storm had a $1 billion positive impact on its results. BP Plc also reported an “exceptional” quarter in gas trading; while it didn’t break out more detail, one Citigroup Inc. analyst estimated BP’s Texas-related gain easily exceeded $1 billion. Meanwhile Australian investment bank Macquarie Group Ltd. pocketed $210 million.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210507234446/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/business/energy/article/Energy-Transfer-Made-2-4-Billion-Gain-From-Texas-16159906.php

Capitalism is at its very finest when gouging customers who have no alternative but to pay whatever price is asked.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, May 13, 2021 8:49 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Who will pay for the failures of Texas' winter storm? Consumers, apparently.

It wasn’t enough for Texans to shiver for days in our heatless houses. It wasn’t enough to miss work for lack of internet. For Mom and Pop to shutter their already struggling business. For homeowners to face broken pipes and water damage. For ratepayers to face sky-high electric bills. For us to wait in line at the grocery store for water because the stuff coming out of faucets was contaminated.

It wasn’t even enough for nearly 200 people to die, some freezing to death in their beds, during Texas’ devastating winter blackouts.

Now, lawmakers expect ordinary Texans to pick up the bill for the government’s incompetence and the private sector’s greed.

After months of testimony, legislative debates and finger-pointing, it’s still anyone’s guess what solutions will become law. But it’s clear who will pay for some of them: consumers, who never voted for Texas’ wild west energy market in the first place and bear no blame for February’s statewide calamity.

Last week, the House approved a $2.5 billion plan to bail out Texas electricity entities at risk of defaulting on debts from the storm. The bill would impose an undisclosed fee on electricity companies, which would be passed on to residential and business ratepayers and the proceeds would be used for bonds to help cover the costs.

It was Gov. Greg Abbott’s appointees at the Texas Public Utility Commission, the elected Railroad Commissioner Christi Craddick and the bureaucrats at ERCOT, the state’s grid operator, whose cascade of failures brought Texas’ grid within seconds of complete collapse.

Indeed, it was government’s fumbling that we now know made a terrible situation worse. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that while ERCOT was desperately trying to meet surging demand amid dwindling power supply, it inadvertently paid natural gas companies to go offline.

ERCOT said that when it activated a program that pays large industrial power users to reduce consumption during emergencies, it didn’t know the list of participants included key pieces of natural gas infrastructure needed to generate power: “We do not know what type of facility it is,” Kenan Ögelman, ERCOT’s vice president of commercial operations, told the Journal.

Who pays for that shoddy bookkeeping? Consumers.

It’s ratepayers, including those who chose fixed-rate energy plans and have thus far avoided higher costs, who could end up with a line-item expense on their monthly bills for years or even decades to compensate, in part, for the billions that electric coops and other entities were charged for power during the state’s astronomical energy pricing that turned out to be both unnecessary and woefully ineffective at luring more power onto the grid.

The added sum on each bill isn’t likely to make many eyes bulge but the unfairness of the charge irks consumer advocates, especially since it isn’t going to anything constructive.

“You’re putting a lien on future generations who are still going to have to pay for what went wrong,” says Tim Morstad, who tracks utility policy at AARP. “It’s a cleanup cost. Those billions of dollars aren’t going to make the gas supply more reliable by making those improvements or making the power generation facilities hardened to be able to withstand cold better.”

A bill to retroactively re-price energy during a point in the storm when ERCOT, the state’s grid operator, left it in place long after the emergency was over, had passed the Senate but was shut down by House Speaker Dade Phelan. The fallout has been severe with several entities in bankruptcy.

Somebody’s got to bail them out. Why not consumers, who unlike industry, have very little voice in any aspect of Texas’ system, from the ERCOT board to public utility regulation?

And it won’t just be Texas consumers. Our energy market is so big that the winter freeze that crippled our energy grid had a broad impact, with gas utilities as far north as Minnesota complaining that spiking gas prices left them, and potentially their customers, with a $800 million bill.

“The ineptness and disregard for common-sense utility regulation in Texas makes my blood boil and keeps me up at night,” Katie Sieben, chairwoman of the Minnesota Public Utility Commission, told the Washington Post in a story last month. “It is maddening and outrageous and completely inexcusable that Texas’s lack of sound utility regulation is having this impact on the rest of the country.”

We couldn’t have said it better.

Beyond the sudden and calamitous price surges, Texas’ big failing ahead of the storm was its refusal to require energy companies to winterize their facilities. The state didn’t require it and the companies didn’t bother to do it on their own. And who will pay for it?

Meanwhile, taxpayers across the nation could technically compensate Texas for its poor planning if bipartisan legislation by Sen. John Cornyn and U.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Dallas, succeeds in supplying federal taxpayer funds to cover winterization that private companies should have completed long ago.

Mandated weatherization itself is probably the most important provision in any of the bills addressing the winter storm. Abbott has thrown his support behind the effort and legislation has even included hefty fines for noncompliance. Lawmakers should resist pressure to cut deals with oil and gas or any other industry seeking to squirm out of investing in basic insurance against predictable extreme weather events.

It’s the least, the very least, lawmakers can do in a session that has been pathetically short on real action. Legislation that offered fundamental market reform went nowhere, so Texas’ system still incentivizes crisis with high profits for producers. Speaking personally, I was very pleased with the profits for natural gas producers. Thank you, GOP, for all your help!

And no legislation being seriously considered appears to prevent another blackout.

“I don’t know any lawmakers who will say this won’t happen again,” Morstad says.

In what world is it OK for consumers to pay a heavy price for such a paltry result?

In Texas.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210513124530/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/opinion/editorials/article/Editorial-Who-will-pay-Texas-winter-storm-failures-16172964.php

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, May 23, 2021 9:07 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


'Collective amnesia': Texas GOP politicians knowingly blew 3 chances to fix the failing power grid

In 1989, Texas suffered a cold snap considered worse if not equal to the winter storm earlier this year yet managed to keep the grid functioning, with only a few hours of rotating outages. But then George Bush, Republican, replaced Ann Richards, Democrat, for Texas governor. With each passing year, the grid has steadily become less reliable.

February’s Winter Storm Uri brought the Texas power grid to within five minutes of complete collapse, officials acknowledged. Millions of residents were left without power for days in subfreezing temperatures; nearly 200 died.

Ten years ago, Texas power plants froze during a fast-moving winter storm, causing rolling electricity blackouts across the state. Outraged Texas regulators and lawmakers, vowing to crack down, debated requiring energy companies to protect their equipment against extreme weather to ensure reliability.

But they didn’t.

Nine years ago, two state agencies that regulate utilities and the oil and gas industry warned that natural gas facilities that lost power during outages couldn’t feed electricity generation plants, creating a spiral of power loss. The agencies jointly recommended that lawmakers compel gas suppliers and power plants to fix the problem.

But they didn’t.

Eight years ago, economists warned that the state’s free-market grid left companies with little incentive to build enough plants to provide backup power during emergencies. With the support of then-Gov. Rick Perry, legislators and regulators considered increasing power rates to encourage the construction of more power plants, so that Texas, like other states, would have sufficient reserves.

But they didn’t.

In the wake of each power failure, or near-failure, over the past decade, Texas lawmakers have repeatedly stood at a fork in the road. In one direction lay government-mandated solutions that experts said would strengthen the state’s power system by making it less fragile under stress. The other direction continued Texas’ hands-off regulatory approach, leaving it to the for-profit energy companies to decide how to protect the power grid.

In each instance, lawmakers left the state’s lightly regulated energy markets alone, choosing cheap electricity over a more stable system. As a result, experts say, the power grid that Texans depend on to heat and cool their homes and run their businesses has become less and less reliable — and more susceptible to weather-related emergencies.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210521235354/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/news/investigations/article/texas-politicians-power-grid-failures-blackout-16185399.php

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, May 24, 2021 6:58 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


How Houston's winter storm went from wonderland to deadly disaster

Thursday, Feb. 11. 62 degrees

Texas’ power grid operates on a just-in-time electricity model, where power supplies are closely matched with demand. ERCOT relies on sophisticated weather and demand forecasts to manage the flow of power from power plant to customer. Unlike other states that mandate higher levels of excess power, ERCOT does not operate with a lot of spare power on the grid — by design.

ERCOT predicted power demand would spike to more than 70,000 megawatts on Sunday, a record for a Texas winter. In November, the agency had predicted peak winter demand would hit only 57,699 megawatts.

The agency’s forecast set off a red flag for Adam Sinn, president of Houston electricity trading firm Aspire Commodities. He realized 70,000 megawatts were dangerously close to all the power that would be available under perfect conditions, let alone a freak cold snap.

Then it dawned on him: ERCOT would not have enough power.

Some 250 miles away, analysts at Vistra Energy, a power company outside Dallas, had come to the same conclusion. They reached out to ERCOT, warning the grid would be short 10,000 megawatts on Monday and Tuesday.

Friday, Feb. 12, noon. 40 degrees

Demand for power surged as temperatures plunged and Texans turned up their thermostats. As power supplies fell, wholesale electricity prices started to skyrocket.

Texas is one of 16 states with a deregulated energy market, allowing consumers to buy electricity from hundreds of retail electricity providers instead of a single regulated utility. Retail power companies buy electricity on the wholesale market directly from power plant operators and sell it to customers. The electricity is distributed to customers by regulated utilities such as CenterPoint Energy.

About 70 percent of Texans have fixed-rate electricity contracts. The rest have variable-rate contracts, where the price of electricity fluctuates month to month or even minute-by-minute based on the wholesale market.

Retail power companies, facing the likelihood they would have to buy power at much higher rates than were set in contracts, urged customers to reduce electricity consumption, offering cash incentives and even a chance to win a Tesla.

Griddy, a small provider, used a different model, offering access to fluctuating wholesale electricity prices for a monthly fee. Most of the time, wholesale prices are much lower than those in standard retail contracts. But wholesale prices change constantly, and they can quickly soar.

Griddy warned its 29,000 Texas customers to switch to other providers offering fixed-rate plans. About 10,000 customers did. (Long story made short: Griddy was out of business by the end of the storm)

Sunday, Feb. 14, 7 p.m. 34 degrees

At ERCOT’s Grid Control Center at its headquarters outside Austin, controllers monitored the flow of electricity across some 46,500 miles of transmission lines, balancing power supply and demand for 29 million Texans.

Magness was feeling good as power demand surged to 76,000 megawatts, an all-time winter peak. The system was holding up.

But temperatures kept falling. Natural gas wells froze over as water used in hydraulic fracturing turned to ice. Sleet and snow froze wind turbines in West Texas. A sensor at a nuclear power plant in East Texas malfunctioned.

This could have been prevented. After a 2011 freeze led to rolling blackouts in Texas, federal authorities advised state regulators to weatherize power plants and ensure adequate energy supplies to prevent a repeat. The state failed to do so.

Shortly after 11 p.m., power plants started shutting down, lighting up computer monitors and large screens with yellow, orange and red alarms. An hour later, power reserves dropped dangerously low, forcing ERCOT to issue an emergency alert for all available generation to start firing.

Monday, Feb. 15, 1:23 a.m. 27 degrees

Engineers in ERCOT’s control room realized the grid was in trouble.

ERCOT ordered CenterPoint Energy and other utilities to cut power to customers through rolling blackouts aimed at balancing demand with rapidly shrinking supplies to keep the grid functioning. The first order came around 1:25 a.m., for the reduction of about 1,000 megawatts.

Texas’ grid requires enough power to maintain a frequency of around 60 hertz before power plants start cascading offline — like a home fuse blowing when too many appliances are plugged in at once. The rapid drop in generation, however, caused the frequency to fall below that level, threatening a total collapse of the grid that would take weeks to restore.

Unwilling to let that happen, ERCOT’s control room ordered utilities to cut 10,500 megawatts of power, sending 2.1 million homes into frigid darkness. Later, Magness would testify that while there was plenty to criticize about ERCOT’s performance in the lead-up to the storm, the decision made in those critical moments was the right one.

“If we had let the situation slip into a blackout, we would be sitting here today not talking about what happened but when are we ever going to get the grid back up,” Magness said.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210524102735/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/news/investigations/article/failures-of-power-series-part-2-blackouts-houston-16189658.php

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, May 26, 2021 6:25 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


How can Texas fix its broken power grid? Can we trust politicians to get it done?

Rob Snyder quit the retail power business two years ago, no longer willing to take what he viewed as an increasing and unacceptable risk. In 2019, he sold his firm, Stream Energy, for $300 million to the Houston power company NRG Energy.

Snyder was mostly worried about broiling summer days when power supplies often are stretched to their limits. But his analysis, borne out over four frigid days in mid-February, pinpoints the underlying problem that led to the massive failure of the state’s power system and an estimated 200 deaths across Texas: a shortage of power when conditions turn extreme.

It’s a problem that will be neither cheap nor easy to fix. At the most fundamental level, experts say, avoiding another grid disaster will require the rethinking of a market-driven system that favors efficiency — and the resulting lower prices — over reliability, which requires backup generation and redundant systems that can add significant costs, even if they are rarely used.

What worries insiders such as Snyder is politicians are looking for simple fixes, a checklist of solutions to protect against a repeat of February’s frigid weather, as opposed to creating a more resilient system capable of handling extreme weather yet to be anticipated.

“I’m getting a lot of calls from legislators, and frankly the people who are going to be voting on this understand the problem just enough to be really freaking dangerous,” Snyder said in March. “I don’t know how this is going to come out.”

The Texas Legislature is moving to require power generators, natural gas operators and pipeline companies to better weatherize their systems, as well as revamp the organizations that oversee the grid and power system, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, and the Public Utility Commission. But these measures do little to induce power companies to have sufficient generation ready for unusual weather that drives electricity demand far beyond what was forecast, experts say.

For the past decade, ERCOT has operated with the smallest amount of backup generation of any grid in the country. In 2019, ERCOT ran a reserve margin of just 9 percent, compared to 19 percent in the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, which runs from Minnesota to Louisiana, and 32 percent in Southwest Power Pool, which spans an area running from the Texas Panhandle to North Dakota.

That margin is increasing — reaching 15.5 percent this summer — but almost all of it comes from new solar and wind farms, which are weather-dependent and can’t be counted on during power shortages.

“The power market needs to do two things. It needs to provide power today, but it also needs to plan years ahead. And that’s where the Texas market fails,” said Eric Fell, who studies power and gas markets for the research firm Wood Mackenzie. “ERCOT has skated by for years with several close calls where we avoided blackouts because the weather wasn’t quite so crazy.”

An influx of renewables

Running a grid necessitates a constant balancing of electricity demand and supply. Historically, that meant ramping power plants up and down, depending on whether temperatures were rising or falling, or households were turning on televisions and dishwashers.

But as renewables have expanded in recent years, accounting for as much as 42 percent of the state’s electricity generation during some months, the grid has become far more difficult to manage. Grid operators must predict how much power wind turbines and solar panels will generate based on weather forecasts, which is relatively easy for tomorrow, but not three weeks in advance.

To manage this unknown, power grid operators rely on backup generation — a rule of thumb is one megawatt of backup for every megawatt of wind or solar. Grid-scale batteries offer an enticing option, storing solar power in the day and discharging it at night, but the costs remain prohibitive. So, power grid operators rely on natural gas plants, which can ramp up quickly when winds drop or clouds move in.

But renewables complicate this obvious solution by driving down power prices, making investors reluctant to sink hundreds of millions of dollars into building gas-fired plants. Since 2011, only 6,500 megawatts of additional gas capacity — enough to power about 1.3 million homes — has been built, compared to almost 40,000 megawatts of wind and solar.

And as more renewables come online, driving prices down further and discouraging investment in backup power, the problem is only expected to worsen. Some analysts worry that Texas could have insufficient generation to meet summer demand in just a few years.

“The mistake we made is if you increase prices across the board, you’re just going to get more of whatever the cheapest resource is,” said Katie Coleman, an attorney representing large industrial and power consumers. “We have such a high quantity of renewables, if they all show up we have a ton of power on the system, and prices get really low even though demand is really high. That’s sort of good for customers, but when wind or solar doesn’t show up, that’s where we have an issue.”

One bill by Rep. Phil King, R-Weatherford, seeks to charge wind and solar generators for the cost of building additional gas plants or other backup for the grid. But that idea was set aside amid criticism it would make the cost of building wind and solar prohibitive when more clean energy is needed to fight climate change.

Grids across the country are managing the onslaught of renewables. Following the 2014 “polar vortex” that drove record natural gas prices, PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest power grid covering 13 states in the Northeast and Midwest, imposed a minimum price on power to protect coal and nuclear power plants, which tend to perform better during cold snaps, from competition with cheaper natural gas plants and renewables.

PJM, like all deregulated markets in the United States other than ERCOT’s, operates a capacity market, paying for power generation to be ready for theoretical emergencies years down the line.

Texas has long resisted such a move, with large power consumers such as petrochemical plants and big-box stores lobbying hard against a capacity system they argue provides windfalls for power plants at the expense of customers. When the utility commission took steps in 2013 toward a capacity market — which would have increased electricity bills by 1.4 percent — the Legislature warned the commission that it was overstepping its authority.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210525113118/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/news/investigations/article/failures-of-power-texas-grid-ercot-problem-fix-16191651.php

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, June 14, 2021 5:12 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Tight grid conditions expected due to high number of forced generation outages

Grid operator requests energy conservation

AUSTIN, TX, June 14, 2021 – The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) is asking Texans to reduce electric use as much as possible today through Friday, June 18. A significant number of forced generation outages combined with potential record electric use for the month of June has resulted in tight grid conditions.

Generator owners have reported approximately 11,000 MW of generation is on forced outage for repairs; of that, approximately 8,000 MW is thermal and the rest is intermittent resources. According to the summer Seasonal Assessment of Resource Adequacy, a typical range of thermal generation outages on hot summer days is around 3,600 MW. One MW typically powers around 200 homes on a summer day.

"We will be conducting a thorough analysis with generation owners to determine why so many units are out of service," said ERCOT Vice President of Grid Planning and Operations Woody Rickerson. "This is unusual for this early in the summer season."

Today’s peak load forecast may exceed 73,000 MW. The peak demand record for June is 69,123 MW set on June 27, 2018 between 4 and 5 p.m.

www.ercot.com/news/releases/show/233037

View current load and available generation at http://www.ercot.com

Is Texas about to go dark again?


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, June 15, 2021 7:41 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Earlier this month, Gov. Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 3 into law, which mandates the weatherization of power plants; creates a statewide emergency alert system; improves communication among those in the industry; and designates some natural gas facilities as “critical” so their power can’t be turned off during crises.

Abbott said the bill, along with a handful of others, ensured “that everything that needed to be done was done to fix the power grid in Texas.”

Experts, however, said the early season conservation alerts by ERCOT show that a fundamental problem remains unaddressed: The state needs more power generation to keep up with its population and handle emergency situations.

The new law “was destined to fail because no one would invest in new capacity or at least not invest fast enough to keep pace with demand,” said Ed Hirs, an energy fellow with the University of Houston. “There’s really no incentive to reinvest or maintain the grid for weatherization.”

www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/ERCOT-issues-intermit
tent-conservation-alerts-16246788.php

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, June 28, 2021 12:12 PM

JAYNEZTOWN




Analysis: The Texas electric grid and the improvements that didn't come
https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/texas-ercot-power-gri
d-legislature-16230665.php

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Sunday, July 11, 2021 10:37 AM

JAYNEZTOWN

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Sunday, July 11, 2021 11:25 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Power plants that failed Texas in February also triggered June's power grid scare
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/energy/2021/07/10/ercot-plants-te
xas-power-outages-february-june-breakdown-unplanned-outages/7926109002/
The article tells you WHY the operators of power plants would want the power to fail:
Quote:
"But the fact that these same plants went offline in normal weather (for June) means their problems go beyond insufficient weatherization for freezing temperatures and perhaps reveals an underlying lack of sufficient maintenance," Jones said. "It suggests (the plants') maintenance standards are inferior to what should be the norm."

Wholesale prices on the deregulated ERCOT power market soared last month when it appeared electricity was in short supply relative to demand. The price shot up to $1,828.65 per megawatt-hour on June 13 and $1,952.86 on June 14 after topping out at $31.52 on June 11.
The operators of power plants will be stingy about maintenance because:

1) Maintenance costs money. The less maintenance, the more money they make.

2) If there is an artificial shortage of electricity caused by lack of maintenance, the price for electricity will soar, which means the operators make more money.

In other words, when operators of power plants can only make 99% of the required power because of less maintenance, the operators charge $1,828.65 per megawatt-hour while the operators can charge only a measly $31.52 per megawatt-hour when power plants can make 101% of the required power. The operators are strongly motivated to engineer a power shortage in order to make more money, but they have to do it in a way that is not obvious that they deliberately caused a power shortage.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, July 16, 2021 7:35 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Texas oil and gas regulator needs to explain failure during February blackout

The more we learn about how and why the grid failed, the more apparent our state regulators’ failure becomes.

Texas’s natural gas producers definitely were the problem, according to a new report from 12 University of Texas at Austin faculty members. And Craddick’s Railroad Commission could have done more to prevent blackouts.
The 100 page Report: https://energy.utexas.edu/sites/default/files/UTAustin%20%282021%29%20
EventsFebruary2021TexasBlackout.pdf

West Texas natural gas has a lot of water in it, which can freeze at the wellhead and block the flow. The Commission has repeatedly ignored calls to require well operators to prepare for freezing temperatures. By the time the wells were freezing in February, the Railroad Commission could do little but watch the dominoes fall.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210716112946/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/business/columnists/tomlinson/article/Tomlinson-Texas-oil-and-gas-regulator-needs-to-16317325.php

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, July 31, 2021 8:46 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


The average natural gas bill in Houston could triple next year unless state regulators step in to ease the financial burden after natural gas spot prices spiked during the February freeze.

CenterPoint Energy and a dozen other utilities statewide filed applications Friday that, if approved, would allow the state to issue bonds on the utilities’ behalf to spread the $3.6 billion cost of natural gas during the winter storm over a period of up to 30 years.

If CenterPoint’s application is approved, the average Houston natural gas bill of around $30 a month would go up by between $2 to $5 a month starting next year. If not, CenterPoint said it would have to levy a monthly fee of as high as $40, pushing average natural gas bills to almost $80 in the summer and over $100 in the winter.

More than 1.8 million CenterPoint customers in the Houston area are on the hook for the $1.14 billion natural gas bill incurred by the utility when it was forced to buy natural gas on the spot market when production plummeted during the winter storm.

As a result, natural gas prices in the Houston rose as high as $400 per Dekatherm, compared to average market prices of around $3 per Dekatherm. Dekatherm is a unit of energy used primarily to measure natural gas. If you own natural gas wells, it was a perfectly legal opportunity to gouge your customers.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210730185342/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/business/energy/article/Natural-gas-bills-will-go-up-after-the-winter-16352485.php

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, August 1, 2021 3:23 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


After Kelcy Warren’s Energy Transfer Partners Made Billions from the Deadly Texas Blackouts, He Gave $1 Million to Texas Governor Greg Abbott

The natural gas industry raked in billions during the winter grid failure and Governor Abbott let them off the hook. He was rewarded with a huge campaign contribution from the grid collapse’s biggest profiteer.

https://www.texasobserver.org/after-kelcy-warrens-energy-transfer-part
ners-made-billions-from-the-deadly-texas-blackouts-he-gave-1-million-to-greg-abbott/

https://web.archive.org/web/20210801093729/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/opinion/editorials/article/Editorial-We-froze-and-Abbott-got-paid-1-16354431.php

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, August 3, 2021 7:28 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Although there are consumer protections prohibiting price gouging of essentials such as bottled water and gasoline during hurricanes and other emergencies, there are no such protections for natural gas customers.

Texans are on the hook for $3.6 billion in natural gas costs incurred by utilities during one freezing week in February — a burden consumers will bear for a decade or longer.

During that same winter week, several natural gas pipeline companies and traders made billions of dollars as they transported and sold natural gas at sky-high prices when supplies were short.

Pipeline companies Energy Transfer of Dallas and Kinder Morgan of Houston made $2.4 billion and $1.1 billion, respectively, while British oil major BP made more than $1 billion from its natural-gas trading business during the deadly, historic storm, according to company filings and analyst estimates. Houston pipeline company Enterprise Products Partners said it made $250 million for transporting and selling natural gas at high prices to utilities, industrial customers and power generators during the storm.

Ultimately, Texans will fund these companies’ profits, said Jim Krane, an energy fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

“It’s pretty clear this is a wealth transfer from the public to investors and traders who could capitalize on the high prices,” Krane said. “The frustrating thing is, even though people were shivering in their homes, their (natural gas) bills are going up anyway. They’re still going to have to pay for this. It’s really a slap in the face.”

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210803112421/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/business/energy/article/CenterPoint-customers-will-pay-price-for-natural-16358810.php

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, August 3, 2021 7:52 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Ain't capitalism grand?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.

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Tuesday, August 3, 2021 7:59 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Ain't capitalism grand?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.
It is not actually capitalism, although it does involve money. It is a very simple and straightforward swindle that the governor of Texas is permitting to run. Both natural gas and electricity were being regulated to benefit the customers, but since George Bush became governor, all of his successors have regulated gas and electricity to NOT benefit the customers.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, August 3, 2021 8:06 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Ain't capitalism grand?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.
It is not actually capitalism, although it does involve money. It is a very simple and straightforward swindle that the governor of Texas is permitting to run. Both natural gas and electricity were being regulated to benefit the customers, but since George Bush became governor, all of his successors have regulated gas and electricity to NOT benefit the customers.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Oh. These are the honest jobs then.

But only when Democrats do them, right?

I mean, just look at Illinois. I mean... don't look at everybody fleeing Illinois.



--------------------------------------------------

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Tuesday, August 3, 2021 8:17 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Oh. These are the honest jobs then.
If you knew the Texas natural gas business, and the people who work in it, they see absolutely nothing wrong with natural gas selling for $3 per million British thermal units a couple of weeks before the storm soaring above $1,000 per million British thermal units, shattering records. There was a time when the governor of Texas would NOT allow that price change, which did NOT increase production even a tiny bit. But nowadays, gas producers can lie their heads off and claim they had to raise the price or else no natural gas would flow. Again, the gas producers are lying, but the lies will fool people who don't know how the Texas natural gas business works.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, August 3, 2021 8:25 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Oh. These are the honest jobs then.
If you knew the Texas natural gas business, and the people who work in it, they see absolutely nothing wrong with natural gas selling for $3 per million British thermal units a couple of weeks before the storm soaring above $1,000 per million British thermal units, shattering records. There was a time when the governor of Texas would NOT allow that price change, which did NOT increase production even tiny bit. But nowadays, gas producers can lie their heads off and claim they had to raise the price or else no natural gas would flow. Again, the gas producers are lying, but the lies are a convenient justification to raise prices for people who don't know how the Texas natural gas business works.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two



I'm just wondering what you consider an honest job to be.

You shit all over the workers who turn the gears of the economy in the Olympics thread.

What is an honest job to a Leftist Elitist?

--------------------------------------------------

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Tuesday, August 3, 2021 8:42 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I'm just wondering what you consider an honest job to be.

You shit all over the workers who turn the gears of the economy in the Olympics thread.

What is an honest job to a Leftist Elitist?
Honest work involves NOT lying and NOT cheating and NOT being incompetent. You aren't doing honest work when you lie and cheat and perform poorly to make more money. I kind of noticed, with about a thousand personal experiences in construction, that the so-called "honest" American workers doing "honest" work aren't honest in the least unless there is somebody who will fire them if they are dishonest. It is not really conducive for a harmonious workplace until the dishonest craftsmen who are crooks, liars, thieves and incompetent are culled. Once those worthless Trump-voting bastards have been terminated, things run smoothly and happily for the other workers.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, August 3, 2021 8:45 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I'm just wondering what you consider an honest job to be.

You shit all over the workers who turn the gears of the economy in the Olympics thread.

What is an honest job to a Leftist Elitist?
Honest work involves NOT lying and NOT cheating and NOT being incompetent. You aren't doing honest work when you lie and cheat and perform poorly to make more money. I kind of noticed, with about a thousand personal experiences in construction, that the so-called "honest" American workers doing "honest" work aren't honest in the least unless there is somebody who will fire them if they are dishonest. It is not really conducive for a harmonious workplace until the dishonest craftsmen who are crooks, liars, thieves and incompetent are culled. Once those worthless Trump-voting bastards have been terminated, things run smoothly and happily for the other workers.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two



You're not really putting up the virtue and work ethic of Biden* voters against Trump voters, are you?

That's a can of worms you don't want to open, boy.

--------------------------------------------------

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Thursday, August 5, 2021 2:33 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Price gouging is legal when Texas says so

In March, just after Texas’ devastating winter blackout that killed hundreds, Attorney General Ken Paxton sued a La Quinta in San Antonio for alleged price gouging, declaring that “gross exploitation of Texans” would not be tolerated.

“Companies looking to profit from this tragic event that left millions of Texans without power or water will be aggressively investigated and prosecuted,” Paxton said in a press release.

He accused the motel of taking advantage of surging demand for lodging by charging “exorbitant prices” for rooms. How exorbitant? Triple the normal rates, according to the release.

Just triple. If only Texans had been so lucky when it came to natural gas prices, which soared 100 times their regular level during the freeze.

So why aren’t Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott decrying that exploitation? Why aren’t they firing off press releases and filing lawsuits against natural gas pipeline companies and traders who made billions profiting from Texans’ desperation after Winter Storm Uri?

Because unlike $199 motel rooms and $11 gallons of milk, wholesale electricity prices of $9,000 per megawatt hour were not a quirk of the system but a function.

The companies did exactly what Texas’ deregulated electricity market allows them to do: ramp up production to meet surging demand during a crisis situation and collect handsomely from sky-high emergency pricing.

Call it state-sanctioned exploitation. Call it price-gouging by design. Call it, as San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg put it, “the most massive wealth transfer in Texas history.”

No matter what you call it, it’s a bad deal for Texans who will foot the bill for many years to come on the $3.6 billion in natural gas costs incurred by utilities for one week in February.

Windfall profits included $2.4 billion for Energy Transfer of Dallas, $1.1 billion for Kinder Morgan of Houston and more than $1 billion for BP from its natural-gas trading business, according to the Chronicle’s Paul Takahashi, citing company filings and analyst estimates.

So, other than the zeroes, how is Energy Transfer’s $2.4 billion so different from a motel’s inflated $199 room rate during peak demand?

Some litigants and energy experts claim it isn’t. They point to a section in Texas law that deals with deceptive trade practices which prohibits people during an official disaster from taking advantage of others by selling necessities — including food, lodging and yes, fuel — “at an exorbitant or excessive price.”

But it would seem that the spirit of the law was intended for those acting deceptively and it’s a stretch to argue that a company doing what the law allows, and in fact encourages it to do, is acting deceptively. Unless, of course, utility plaintiffs suing some of these gas companies can prove they purposely withheld gas supplies in order to artificially inflate prices.

There hasn’t been any compelling evidence of that thus far, and it’s important to note that companies such as Energy Transfer made the investments they should have to keep producing during the storm when others were sidelined by frozen facilities and equipment. We’ll leave it for the courts to hash out whether any wrongdoing took place.

But what is deceptive is the way in which Abbott and lawmakers pretend they’ve fixed an electric grid that’s still vulnerable to collapse and lacking an adequate cushion of supply during crisis.

What’s deceptive is our leaders crowing about new weatherization requirements to prevent facilities from freezing again — and then slyly carving out loopholes for a gas industry whose executives are generous campaign contributors to Abbott and other Republicans in control.

What’s deceptive is the idea that Texas’ independent electric grid, cut off from the rest of the country, is somehow saving Texas ratepayers money or providing us with more reliable energy than other states.

We are hypocrites if we ever cast another condescending glance over at California during a blackout there. The Texas grid during Winter Storm Uri came within minutes of total collapse. The widespread blackouts across the Lone Star State were 500 times worse than those affecting California during the 2020 wildfires, Bloomberg reported.

Another tragedy from the storm, besides the loss of life and economic losses, is that ordinary Texans, even those who couldn’t turn on the heat for days during the storm, must pay for the billions in profits to a rich industry only made richer by our misery.

In the Houston area, more than 1.8 million CenterPoint Energy ratepayers are responsible for the $1.14 billion natural gas bill the utility racked up when it was forced to buy energy at astronomical prices.

The average natural gas bill in the Houston area — about $30 — could go up by $2 to $5 a month starting next year if CenterPoint is allowed to use state-issued bonds to finance what it owes, Takahashi reported, noting that it could shake out to $60 more per year for each ratepayer over the next decade.

But if the Texas Railroad Commission rejects CenterPoint’s financing request, the utility could charge customers fees of between $15 and $40 per month over the next year, which could add $480 to Houstonians’ gas bills for the year.

That’s exploitation if we ever saw it — but mostly by state officials who are perfectly comfortable fleecing Texans’ pockets as long as they can line theirs with campaign contributions from a grateful industry.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210805183151/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/opinion/editorials/article/Editorial-Bitter-chill-bitter-bill-Why-are-16365057.php

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, October 19, 2021 8:04 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Texas natural gas industry showing limited progress in winter storm prep, experts say

Efforts to get the Texas natural gas industry ready to operate through another severe winter storm like February’s are so far showing limited gains, with independent experts saying they see little evidence of companies increasing investments in weatherization and other protective measures.

Since the frigid weather knocked out power to millions of Texans, state and federal officials have called on energy companies to weatherize the power grid and the natural gas system on which it relies to avoid a repeat of a disaster that led to more than 200 deaths and billions of dollars in property damage. Experts say the power sector is shoring up generation against cold weather, but there is little evidence the gas industry is doing much to ensure that natural gas keeps flowing even in the harshest winter conditions.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20211019115720/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/business/energy/article/Texas-natural-gas-industry-not-preparing-for-16543874.php

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, October 19, 2021 9:07 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


New study compares the economic policies of Texas and California
https://www.texomashomepage.com/news/new-study-compares-the-economic-p
olicies-of-texas-and-california/

Clean Core Thorium Energy Congratulates Texas A&M on Fabrication of First ANEEL Advanced Nuclear Fuel Pellets
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/clean-core-thorium-energy-congratulates
-120500475.html

China’s ‘artificial sun’ tipped to provide electricity in 10 years if Beijing backs it
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/china-artificial-sun-tipped-electricity-1208
14489.html

“Eco-Friendly Fossil Fuels Are The Way Of The Future,” Says Petroteq Energy
https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/pr/2200447/eco-friendly-fossil-fu
els-are-the-way-of-the-future-says-petroteq-energy

Former Spacex Engineers Develop a Portable Plug-And-Play Nuclear Reactor
https://www.industrytap.com/former-spacex-engineers-develop-a-portable
-plug-and-play-nuclear-reactor/60563

Sites shortlisted for a British fusion energy plant
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10091755/Five-sites-sh
ortlisted-UKs-prototype-fusion-energy-plant.html

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Sunday, November 14, 2021 2:09 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Last Year's Texas Power Outage Will Now Cost Natural Gas Customers $3.4 Billion

"Texans will be paying for the effects of last February's cold snap for decades to come," reports Ars Technica, "as the state's oil and gas regulator approved a plan for natural gas utilities to recover $3.4 billion in debt they incurred during the storm.

"The regulator, the Railroad Commission, is allowing utilities to issue bonds to cover the debt. As a result, ratepayers could see an increase in their bills for the next 30 years."

During the winter storm, natural gas prices spiked as cold temperatures drove demand up while also depressing supply... The governor's office knew of the looming shortages days before they happened, yet the preparations they made did little to alter the course of the disaster... Gas sellers made record profits in just a few days, together bringing in as much as $11 billion, about 70-100 times more than normal, based on spot prices at the time. Meanwhile, many Texans suffered through blackouts and bitter cold, and 210 people died, according to the latest estimate from the Texas Department of State Health Services.

In the wake of the storm, many officials have called on utilities and oil and gas companies to winterize their operations...

Texans aren't the only ones whose bills are higher as a result of producers' and utilities' unwillingness to winterize their equipment. Utilities around the country were forced to buy natural gas at significantly higher prices when Texas' markets went haywire as a result of low supply and high demand. Ratepayers as far away as Minnesota will be paying surcharges for years to come after their utilities had to pay $800 million more than expected for natural gas.

The article also includes a quote from Katie Sieben, chairwoman of the Minnesota Public Utility Commission, from an April article in The Washington Post.

"It is maddening and outrageous and completely inexcusable that Texas' lack of sound utility regulation is having this impact on the rest of the country."

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/21/11/13/0026231/last-years-texas-
power-outage-will-now-cost-natural-gas-customers-34-billion

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, November 14, 2021 3:39 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.



SECOND's eyes light up and his brain goes ka-ching!

Because he's a utilitarian.


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Sunday, November 14, 2021 6:33 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

SECOND's eyes light up and his brain goes ka-ching!

Because he's a utilitarian.

Capitalism is the opposite of Utilitarianism. This multi-billion dollar transfer of wealth from the poor to rich was made by a Texas Commission guided by the Capitalism mythology:
https://www.rrc.texas.gov/about-us/commissioners/

The commissioners are Republicans:
https://ballotpedia.org/Christi_Craddick
https://ballotpedia.org/James_Wright_(Texas)
https://ballotpedia.org/Wayne_Christian_(Texas_legislator)

The voters could have picked anybody but those three swindlers. The swindle is only an extra few dollar per month in the voter's natural gas bill, every month, for the rest of the voter's lives. Too bad, but that is how Capitalism works and the swindlers will deny they authorized a slow, long-term swindle.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, November 15, 2021 4:26 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.



And you're part of that capitalist dream, SECOND, along with those rich Texans you always say you respect. Great job being a utilitarian!

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Monday, November 15, 2021 6:30 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

And you're part of that capitalist dream, SECOND, along with those rich Texans you always say you respect. Great job being a utilitarian!
If you burn natural gas, or gasoline, you are part of the Capitalism mythology, where prices are set by supply and demand. Except the mythology is a scam, a swindle. Prices are arbitrarily set by people, which is why Republican commissioners in Texas could arbitrarily take $billions from millions of buyers and give to dozens of sellers. The buyers will complain, but they will pay in Capitalism. In Utilitarianism, the Republican commissioners go to jail for swindling the buyers and the sad sellers have to be satisfied with not selling for 100 times the normal price of natural gas. So sad.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, November 15, 2021 7:16 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.



Quote:
In Utilitarianism, the Republican commissioners go to jail for swindling the buyers and the sad sellers have to be satisfied with not selling for 100 times the normal price of natural gas. So sad.
Yep. You lied about being a utilitarian. You find its workings sad.

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Monday, November 15, 2021 7:59 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

Quote:
In Utilitarianism, the Republican commissioners go to jail for swindling the buyers and the sad sellers have to be satisfied with not selling for 100 times the normal price of natural gas. So sad.
Yep. You lied about being a utilitarian. You find its workings sad.
When every you write, 1kiki, I get the strong feeling you are unaware that you are full of bullshit. I can't be sure, because you are only disembodied words, but real Texans I know who express the same opinions you do have to struggle daily to stay in the middle class because of the bullshit they believe is Truth guides their decisions.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, November 17, 2021 8:13 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Final Report on February 2021 Freeze Underscores Winterization Recommendations
November 16, 2021

FERC, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) and NERC’s regional entities today issued the final report examining the impact the February 2021 freeze had on the bulk electric system in Texas and other parts of the South Central U.S. This 300-page analysis underscores preliminary recommendations released earlier this fall. The final report includes additional details regarding the need to strengthen rules for cold weather preparedness and coordination to prevent a recurrence of last winter’s blackouts.

More at https://www.ferc.gov/news-events/news/final-report-february-2021-freez
e-underscores-winterization-recommendations

Federal officials concluded that natural gas production equipment freezing up cut off twice as much gas supply as rolling blackouts and downed power lines providing power to natural gas pipeline compressors. The freezing of equipment was completely avoidable, but wasn't avoided because it would have cost money. Why was the money not spent to prevent freezing? Because the resulting natural gas shortages would cause a jump of 100 times in the price of gas. The production companies wanted that price jump, which would not happen if the companies had prevented their equipment from freezing, so the companies didn't prevent it.

The Federal government will probably add rules to curb companies from cheating their customers and falsely blaming the cold weather for super high prices when the gas shortage was deliberately engineered by the companies, which patiently wait for freezing weather as a convenient excuse to price gouge and cheat their customers without the companies being punished by the Federal government. With new rules, punishment will now be possible after years of litigation against the companies that cheat.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, January 9, 2022 4:25 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Natural gas companies failed again, showing Texas energy system still vulnerable

by Chris Tomlinson, Staff writer, Jan. 7, 2022

No one died (this time) nor did the system’s burp cause power outages. But the dip does raise questions about what would happen if another polar vortex dropped into Texas and whether officials have done enough to protect the electric grid.

A team of reporters at the Bloomberg news agency first reported how “instruments froze, output plunged and companies spewed a miasma of pollutants into the atmosphere in a bid to keep operations stable.”

Texas natural gas suppliers released or burned nearly 1 million cubic feet of natural gas, according to compulsory filings with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

BloombergNEF data showed natural gas production sharply dropping at a rate unseen since last February.

The dozen or so affected facilities reported also releasing 85 tons of sulfur dioxide and 11 tons of carbon monoxide. All because corporations did not adequately prepare their equipment for temperatures frequently seen in West Texas.

“The incidents show that our fossil fuel-dependent energy system continues to be unreliable, polluting, and unprepared for the impacts of the climate crisis,” the Lone Star Sierra Club said in a statement.

“Not only did these incidents release pollution that harms public health, they led to a dip in supply that impacted gas and electricity prices for millions of Texans.”

The Reuters news agency reported Monday that national natural gas prices rose 2 percent after the cold in Texas, New Mexico and Colorado.

“Gas prices have been falling recently with the rise in production but gained on Monday as the freeze-offs disconcerted the market,” John Abeln, senior analyst of natural gas research at data provider Refinitiv, told Reuters.

Natural gas production in the lower 48 states dropped by 2.8 billion cubic feet per day during the freeze. Most of that went offline in Texas, Abeln added.

The Texas Railroad Commission regulates natural gas production. Last year, commissioners announced new rules to improve reliability, but those will not take effect until 2023.

I asked the commission for their take on what happened and what it says about the resiliency of natural gas and its role supporting the electric grid in times of crisis. Spokesperson Andrew Keese said the commission had seen no indications of a problem over the weekend.

“The agency has not received any information suggesting that production decreased anywhere near the extent some media outlets have reported,” he wrote in an email. “Pipeline nominations are not the best data source to estimate real-time production changes, especially given markets were closed for the holiday weekend.”

“During the weekend and after, producers did not report any major disruption of gas production,” Keese added.

In other words, the Railroad Commission says there is nothing to see here. But that’s not true.

Natural gas companies did report releasing dangerous and harmful gases because their equipment froze. Refinitiv, which supplies critical information to commodity traders, only makes money from providing accurate data.

Railroad commissioners, meanwhile, have been trying to convince Texans to look the other way for decades. More than two-thirds of their campaign donations come from the industry they regulate, and their rules around safety and environmental protection are the weakest in the nation.

After the February freeze, then-Chair Christi Craddick denied the natural gas industry was responsible for the blackouts. Six months later, however, federal investigators proved they were the main trigger for the disaster.

Current Chair Wayne Christian distributes misleading statistics on social media, blaming wind and solar generation for the blackouts, doing his best to acquit his donors of any fault. He refuses to acknowledge how the Texas electric grid was designed to rely on natural gas in an emergency. When we needed them most, the companies he oversees failed to deliver.

According to Bloomberg, Pioneer Natural Resources reported releasing most of the greenhouse gases over the weekend. I left a message with their media relations manager, who did not return my call, just as they ignored Bloomberg’s call.

Pioneer’s PAC was Christian’s largest donor at $10,000 during the 2020 election cycle, according to Open Secrets, a campaign finance tracking site.

Texans are unlikely to see another polar vortex this year. But that should not breed complacency.

The weekend burp proves the Railroad Commission is still doing more to protect the industry from regulation than Texans from frostbite. Voters should keep that in mind as Christian runs for reelection this year.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220107105750/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/business/columnists/tomlinson/article/Tomlinson-Natural-gas-companies-failed-again-16754515.php

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, January 19, 2022 6:48 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Texans spent an exorbitant amount on electricity during a week in which most of them couldn’t get much electricity. For the entirety of 2020, Texans paid $9.8 billion to keep the juice flowing. But on February 16, 2021, they spent roughly $10.3 billion. Costs for the month of February totaled more than $50 billion.

During the February 2021 freeze, the gas industry failed to deliver critically needed fuel, and while Texans of all stripes suffered, the gas industry scored windfall profits of about $11 billion.

It’s possible that some of the massive profits were illicit. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is looking into potential market manipulation by Texas pipeline companies, which are subject to the least regulation and oversight of any pipelines in the country. Those companies operate in a regulatory penumbra. For their pipelines operating only in Texas, they’re generally exempt from reporting tariffs and other market information the federal government requires of interstate pipelines.

More at https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-electric-grid-failure
-warm-up/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, January 20, 2022 11:08 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Freezing temps heading for Texas could result in gas shortfalls this week, Houston pipeline company Kinder Morgan warned its customers. It's actually a warning that price gouging may happen.

Temperatures in some areas of the Permian Basin could dip into the teens overnight Thursday, which may result in so-called freeze-offs, when liquid inside a well freezes and halts natural gas production.

Last year, supply shortages contributed to a power crisis during February’s winter storm, when equipment froze and 51,173 megawatts of the state’s 82,513 megawatts of generation capacity was forced offline.

Kinder Morgan generated about $1 billion in excess profits during the last shortage by selling much-needed gas at sky-high market rates and looks forward to more excess profits this year.

More at https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Kinder-Morgan
-warns-that-cold-this-week-could-16789128.php

If you want to see how price gouging works to rob you, read
Cold weather brings near record-high natural gas spot prices
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=47016
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2021.03.05/main.svg
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2021.03.05/chart2.svg

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, January 20, 2022 11:44 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


Quote:
Originally posted:
Freezing temps heading for Texas could result in gas shortfalls this week, Houston pipeline company Kinder Morgan warned its customers. It's actually a warning that price gouging may happen.

Temperatures in some areas of the Permian Basin could dip into the teens overnight Thursday, which may result in so-called freeze-offs, when liquid inside a well freezes and halts natural gas production.

Last year, supply shortages contributed to a power crisis during February’s winter storm, when equipment froze and 51,173 megawatts of the state’s 82,513 megawatts of generation capacity was forced offline.

Kinder Morgan generated about $1 billion in excess profits during the last shortage by selling much-needed gas at sky-high market rates and looks forward to more excess profits this year.

More at https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Kinder-Morgan
-warns-that-cold-this-week-could-16789128.php

If you want to see how price gouging works to rob you, read
Cold weather brings near record-high natural gas spot prices
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=47016
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2021.03.05/main.svg
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2021.03.05/chart2.svg
seems an advantage to know when the cold will come, and that the prices will skyrocket.

Heat the house to 90 degrees the day before the cold night, get out layers of blankets and comforters, turn off the heat when prices are too high.

Might think that homes are not insulated for winter. But they must be insulated for summer A/C, which is really the same. Averaging the temp from 90 down to teens should still remain above freezing. And if stove, oven is electric instead of gas, then boiling water or leaving the oven door open could do the trick.

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