Texas power prices soar 20,000% as brutal heat wave sets off emergency

The free market is trying to supply renewables, they are cheaper, more flexible and simple to deploy, the free market loves that shit.

It's vested interests fighting it at every turn that's the issue.

@hoot @L4s The free market will eventually take care of it, although it might take decades or longer to do so. If you don't want to wait decades, then regulate it.

It not price gouging, it's "free market economics". You don't have your MBA yet, do you?

The stars at night Are big and bright Clapclapclapclap Cause we got rolling blackouts

Friday Night Lights

Even motel 6 can do that

We have a saying in germany about our state owned railway operator:

The four biggest enemies of punctuality are Summer, Winter, Autumn and Spring.

Maybe the same is true for energy reliability and ERCOT?

so it's a publicly traded commodity. are there texasmegawatts or what? are there less texasmegawatts then before? because if not, this is how it works. they gain capital, can cheaper lend capital, buy efficient texasmegawattsfacilities.

Someone has to take Ted Cruz to Mexico.

The solution is staring at them straight in the face. Unfortunately, they're so utterly brainwashed that they'll never even consider it.

What you're describing is a pump and dump scheme. In any market where there is low volume, either in terms of units or value, it is possible that a wealthy individual buys a large enough share of the available item to make the price jump up a bunch. Then when other people buy to get in on the next bitcoin/NFT/GME craze, often motivated by person A, that first person can then sell to the next wave.

What is weird about the power grid is that A) electricity has to be used at the time of purchase so you couldn't resell it and B) there are often power plants specifically for spikes in demand (called peaker plants) that rely on those moments to jump in and produce to make their profit, keeping things under control. However if you're the Texas grid, which is isolated from any other electric grid, you can just ignore obvious signs that more power is needed and everytime demand spikes you make a bunch of profit and super promise you'll fix it for the next time

Contrary to what clickbait articles lead you to believe these spikes are incredibly brief. https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/systemwideprices

I’m really not sure how else an electrical grid is supposed to artificially encourage lowering demand than to fluctuate pricing. Lots of new appliances now can connect to the grid and shut themselves down temporarily when costs are high, this is an opt-in system that without pricing tied to it most people would ignore. If you need to use electricity at high demand time it had better be important.

And yes I realize in an ideal world every electrical grid would be 10,000% oversized and be able to handle infinite demand. That is unfortunately not the world we live in.