Messing With Texas

I understand the power did come on in Texas awhile back, although it isn’t clear to me if everyone is getting clean water out of their faucets by now. The one thing I do know is that Texas isn’t going to reform the system that caused the power/water disaster last February.

On March 5, the Austin American-Statesman reported that $16 billion in overcharges for wholesale electricity would not be reversed.

The overcharges occurred because the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which oversees the grid and is commonly known as ERCOT, kept the prices at the maximum level allowable — $9,000 per megawatt hour — during the 32-hour period. ERCOT should have stopped intervening by then because the power crisis was over and instead let supply and demand determine pricing, Potomac said.

As I understand it, the issue is not that the  $9000-per-hour rate was allowed for the entire time of the weather emergency, but that the rate was allowed to remain at $9000 per hour for 32 hours longer than the actual emergency. Thus, it was a windfall. “Potomac” is “Potomac Economics, a Virginia-based firm that’s paid by the state to provide an arm’s-length assessment of the Texas power grid.”

The Public Utility Commission oversees ERCOT. At ERCOT’s request, it initially set the price at the $9,000 cap — from a market price of about $1,200 at the time — during a specially called meeting Feb. 15 in an effort to incentivize as many generators as possible to keep producing power early in the weather emergency.

I am guessing this is connected to the outrageous bills some Texans got after the power outage. OK, but why can’t the outrageous overcharges be reversed?

Because it’s hard.

“There are always winners and losers on both sides (of a transaction), because that pie doesn’t change size, even if you reprice,” said Randa Stephenson, LCRA’s senior vice president for wholesale markets. “It’s really hard to go back and change the rules when people make business decisions off of them.”

LCRA is Lower Colorado River Authority, a company that was able to keep most of its power operations functioning. I take it they cleaned up, big time.

A couple of days ago, Texas Monthly reported that LCRA and others have nothing to worry about.

While many Texans last week were worried about sky-high electric bills from February’s winter storms, the state’s sole utility commissioner was privately reassuring out-of-state investors who profited from the crisis that he was working to keep their windfall safe.

Texas Monthly has obtained a recording of a 48-minute call on March 9 in which Texas Public Utility Commission chairman Arthur D’Andrea discussed the fallout from the February power crisis with investors. During that call, which was hosted by Bank of America Securities and closed to the public and news media, D’Andrea took pains to ease investors’ concerns that electricity trades, transacted at the highest prices the market allows, might be reversed, potentially costing trading firms and publicly traded generating companies millions of dollars.

“I apologize for the uncertainty,” D’Andrea said, promising to put “the weight of the commission” behind efforts to keep billions of dollars from being returned to utilities that were forced—thanks to decisions by the PUC—to buy power at sky-high prices, even after the worst of the blackout had passed.

But wait, there’s more — the Texas legislature proposed that $5.1 billion of the $16 billion windfall be “reallocated.”  Lt. Governor Dan Patrick advocated doing this, a development that perplexed Texas Monthly, since Patrick really isn’t into doing things. Texas Monthly reported today:

In normal times, the lieutenant governor is most comfortable focusing on red-meat culture war issues, such as bathroom bills and demanding the Star-Spangled Banner be played before sporting events. But as Texas’s second-ranking statewide elected official, one who controls every bill that passes through the state Senate, his job often calls for him to oversee legislative responses to crises. When it does, the former radio host usually becomes a bullhorn, drawing attention to himself and the crisis, and demands private solutions to issues rather than legislative ones that conflict with his conservative worldview.

And, indeed, Patrick seems utterly uninterested in overhauling the stupid “free market” system that left much of the state without power and water for days. But for some reason he has zeroed in on the $5.1 billion as the hill he’s prepared to defend, if not die on.

Little more than two weeks after his press tour, Patrick berated Governor Greg Abbott’s only remaining appointee on the PUC, Arthur D’Andrea, in a rare Senate committee hearing appearance. The lieutenant governor then suspended every rule he could to rush the passage of a contested plan to claw back the $5.1 billion, before encountering opposition from House Speaker Dade Phelan. Finally, after his fight seemed all but dead Tuesday evening, Texas Monthly broke news that D’Andrea had promised to try to protect the windfall of investors who made money off the blackouts. Patrick then revived his push for the House to follow the Senate’s lead and order the PUC to reprice.

Patrick’s trying to do something useful, which is totally out of character, has fueled spectulation that he will run for governor in 2022.

Oh, and D’Andrea has resigned.

What this whole episode reveals, seems to me, is the degree to which the Texas Republicans are more interested in maximizing profits for fossil fuel companies than in providing affordable and reliable energy. If I lived in Texas and had gotten some $10,000 bill for a few days of electricity I think I would be a tad, um, miffed at all this.

And from what I’ve read, no one is seriously considering such reforms as uniting with the national grid or requiring energy suppliers to weather-proof their oil pumps and gas lines. Some bills introduced in the legislature sorta kinda proposed that weatherproofing would be nice, but they did not stipulate who would pay for the upgrades. And there has been no serious discussion of eliminating the unregulated system.

Many Texas politicians are, I’m sure, assuming that the February freeze was a once-in-a-century freak storm. But it probably wasn’t.

Back in February, Ezra Klein wrote an op ed for the New York Times that made two important points:

One, “Climate change promises far more violent events to come.”

Two, “The most common mistake in politics is to believe there is some level of suffering that will force responsible governance. There isn’t.”

The next big unexpected but much predicted actic freeze in Texas could easily wipe out the power grid for months, not days. And that could happen next winter. It’s almost certain to happen while a lot of the bozos in the Texas government now are still in office. And as they stand on  the ruins of many lives and jobs, and the Texas economy in general, they will promise to build back some other Ayn Rand monstrosity of an unregulated system so that their cronies in the fossil fuel industry can get richer. That’s a given.

And I’m not at all certain that Texas voters will demand anything different.

Along these lines, do see In the shadow of its exceptionalism, America fails to invest in the basics at the Washington Post. Excellent analysis of how we’ve been neglecting infrastructure for more than 50 years.

13 thoughts on “Messing With Texas

  1. Yeah, business from all over the country will move to Texas. It will be that the little guy will skip out on the bill he has no way to pay. The homeowner may find it much harder and business with a large plant, impossible. 

    The question is how much Democrats will be willing to spend educating voters. NOT winning the next election – actually making sure voters understand how they are fleeced by the system that the GOP will defend. This means promoting ideas in venues other than commercials in languages other than English.

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  2. I wonder about the magnitude of the injury (number of people/businesses whose finances are severely hit by this) vs the intransigence of the powers that be, and will the latter cave, or will they hang on to their Free Market Religion till they get swept away.

    God has been good to Team D – COVID helped push Trump out, and the Big Freeze will likely help Texas turn Blue. Keep it comin… Beta O'Rourke is only 48, plenty of time for the blue wave to build and crest.

  3. Miffed, schmiffed! 

    I'd a-been homicidally P-O'd!!!!!

    And as if there ain't enough reasons to hate the f#ing Dallas f#cking Cowboys, right after everything got reconnected, their owner, Jerry Jones, was overheard chortling in glee as he announced in public how many hundereds-of-millions/billions he'd made because of the deadly ice-storm and power-outage

    Way to stay humble, good "Christian Jerry…

    GO GIANTS!!!!

  4. Miffed, schmiffed! 

    I'd a-been homicidally P-O'd!!!!!

    And as if there ain't enough reasons to hate the f#ing Dallas f#cking Cowboys, right after everything got reconnected, their owner, Jerry f#cking Jones, was overheard chortling in glee about how many billions or hundereds-of-millions he'd just made because of the deadly ice-storm and power-outage

    Way to stay humble before the Lord, good "Christian" Jerry…

    GO GIANTS!!!!

  5. It just seems the further south you go in the U.S., the lower the IQs.  I know there are smart progressives in TX, but there's more wacko wingnut Evangelicals.

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    • It comes down to what culture became dominant in each part of the US. New England is home to a kind of eastern aristocracy, animated by noblesse oblige (if you've made it, you've got to help others). FDR and Papa Bush are examples.

      The south was dominated by plantation culture, which is all about keeping others down. It's the right wing, hierarchical mentality writ large.

      It's been my contention that the wide spread use of air-conditioning was the particular technology that made the low-cost south more habitable and economically competitive with the north, and so economic and political power moved south.

      I've had friends in Australia make a similar observation about their northern states – in essence, the more north you go, the more wacko it gets.

      • Also it's important to remember that the whole idea of public school originated in New England and spread in the northern states first, but lagged behind in the South. And even when public schools became the norm in the South, southern states invested less money in them compared to northern states. And that got worse after desegregation, when white parents bugged out of the public school system and sent their kids to white "Christian" schools that mostly provided a piss-poor education but were, um, white. The quality of public schools nationwide is pretty uneven, even within the same states, of course. Education Week says the best-rated publis schools are in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Maryland, and the lowest are Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Nevada, and New Mexico.  

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  6. Messing with California – the wingnuts have amassed enough signatures, or nearly enough to recall Gov Newsom. I just got a solicitation from Newsom to help fight this off. I feel so very very lucky to live in a blue state, and I gotta do whatever I can to help hold the firewall.

    Recalls are a bit too easy here; they recalled Gray Davis about 15 years ago, he was replaced with Arnold – a novice who turned out to be too liberal for the wingnuts back east.

    •  “The most common mistake in politics is to believe there is some level of suffering that will force responsible governance. There isn’t.”

      This is true. But hopefully, people would be wise and considerate enough with their plans. Time to think about the majority. 

      -Matthew | Southwood Riviera

  7. I had a friend tell me one time that the reason Texas doesn't slide into the Gulf of Mexico is because Oklahoma sucks.  That basically sums up my opinion of both states, except I wouldn't miss Texas if it did slide into the Gulf of Mexico.

  8. Two, “The most common mistake in politics is to believe there is some level of suffering that will force responsible governance. There isn’t.”

    If I wasn't cynical enough to believe that, having watched Republican reactions to the  Trump administration, for four year,s really hammered it home.

  9. One needs to mess with Texas as Texas is most certainly out to mess with you.  Enron may be gone but the idea of control of the power supply chain and the willingness to extort from every California grandma still remains.  It all boils down to a  monopoly, because your house only has one set of power lines to it.  You have no choice in who to buy your power from. 

    The progressive idea that needs support is the idea that you should have the right to sell extra power to the national system at a fair price.  This is the sane future.  Individuals generate enviornmentally friendly solar and wind energy and sell extra to the grid.  Right now  big energy uses big political power to block this practice, as they want control of the supply.  This needs to be reversed.  Monopolies need to be controlled and regulated by benevolent forces not by extortionist motivated greed. 

  10. Texans: We want free, unfettered capitalism! USA! USA!

    ERCOT: Here's a $16,000 electric bill

    Texans: Not like that.

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