Thanks, GOP

With just over two weeks remaining in the legislative session, the governor’s office is getting the first key bill that Texas House and Senate lawmakers have passed in response to February’s widespread power outages. https://t.co/zh0qH9guOw #TXlege

— Texas Tribune (@TexasTribune) May 13, 2021

And it ain’t worth shit.

Griddy, the main supplier of electricity at wholesale prices, is in bankruptcy court. The people who got screwed are still screwed. And banning companies like Griddy from the Texas market does absolutely nothing to address the cause of the grid failure in February.

The main incentive with plans like Griddy’s is cheap electric bills — when power is plentiful. But when electricity in the market is scarce, as was the case during February’s winter storm, the wholesale price for electricity rises. Griddy, with its approximately 29,000 customers who were charged $29 million for energy during the winter storm, according to bankruptcy court documents, has gone out of business.

The Public Utility Commission, which oversees the grid operator, raised the wholesale market price of electricity to $9,000 per megawatt-hour for days during the height of the deadly winter storm to entice power generators to produce more electricity. The price hike is a feature of the Texas electricity market’s emergency protocol, carried out by the main grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. The average price for power in 2020 was $22 per megawatt-hour.

That "price hike feature" (NOT a bug!) is an interesting one.  It's supposed to dissuade consumers from using electricity during a shortage.  Problem is, the average consumer who is not a refinery or a factory, gets the bill a month after the crisis, and only then finds out he was paying the highest possible rates for the energy needed to keep his house above 30 degrees (my house got that cold in February inside.  But there was no electricity to run my furnace, so I wasn't worried about my electric bill.  Of course, I wasn't on Griddy, so I wasn't worried anyway.)

Kind of hard to be dissuaded from using something when you don't find out until weeks later how much it was costing you.  Yes, that's the idiot system the Lege saddled us with earlier in the century.  FREEDUMB!!!!

But experts said many electricity consumers are not as aware of the price fluctuations as some “sophisticated” electricity customers, who can manage on wholesale energy plans because they know what they’re signing up for and the potential financial pitfalls.

Beth Garza, director of ERCOT’s independent watchdog from 2014-19, said the volatility around these plans can be a serious challenge.

“They can get so high,” Garza said of the potential price of electricity when power is scarce. “But even with them getting so high, if you can manage that volatility you will pay less money on your electric bill. The problem is, most of us can’t manage or don’t want to manage those kinds of swings.”

I mean, yeah, but Beth Garza is living in an ivory tower.  There were reports in February of retired people, who signed up with Griddy to lower their electricity costs, having their bank accounts vacuumed out by Griddy's auto-payment system and the outrageous (but legal!) spikes in electricity cost.  Those people didn't "manage" those "swings" because by the time they found out about them, it was too late.  There was a problem with the system, but it wasn't the consumers.

Pat Wood, the former PUC chair, is one electricity customer who had been on a Griddy plan. He has said he was able to fend off an exorbitant February power bill thanks in part to the solar panels installed at his home that provided an independent source of power while Griddy’s rates likely rose for customers who couldn’t generate their own power.

Another interesting example,  Most people on Griddy didn't have solar panels on the roof, largely because that's why they were on Griddy:  so they wouldn't have those capital investments to make.  Back to retired people on fixed incomes, some of whom lost their life savings in the blink of an eye.  I guess they should have known the Lege had played them for suckers 20 years ago, huh?

So where are we now?  Right where most of us expected to be:

Recently, the House advanced a $2.5 billion plan to bail out Texas’ distressed electricity market from the financial crisis stemming from the storm. The plan would impose a fee — likely for the next decade or longer — on electricity companies, which would then get passed on to residential and business customers in their power bills. Similar legislation is being considered in the Senate.

That legislation would do nothing to address challenges that future inclement weather could present. Other related bills being considered by legislators include protecting the state’s oil and gas industry from efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, replacing experts on ERCOT’s board with political appointees and targeting renewable energy sources, which experts have called “discriminatory” and “politically motivated.”

Any of that sound like a plan to protect Texans from another disastrous February?  ERCOT has already announced expected blackouts this summer, just because it's Texas and we get hot in the summer.  Will the governor call a special session this summer to address that problem?

I wouldn't hold my breath.  You'd be better off to just leave the state until November.

A plan to subsidize power plant upgrades for extreme weather, however, could begin to address critical needs after the storm. But Garza said an enforcement mechanism and clear weatherization standards need to be in place in order for there to be real impact.

“Just telling people to weatherize is meaningless,” Garza said.

It's a representative system.  That doesn't mean it's a responsive system.