Comment by nonethewiser
2 years ago
So essentially its high growth in energy demand? And probably it not making sense financially to overbuild.
2 years ago
So essentially its high growth in energy demand? And probably it not making sense financially to overbuild.
The demand is there, the building is there, but if you overbuild you can get screwed very hard, so the power companies have (very complex, mind you) models that they use to determine if a plant will make sense to bring online.
Those models may have been wrong, or based on assumptions about temperatures that turned out incorrect.
From the incentives, having blackouts is more financially desirable than overbuilding. This situation isn’t surprising.
It sucks if you’re like, you know, a person living there, but in terms of finance incentives, it’s close to the best possible outcome, right?
replying to my sibling commentor, vel0city:
My neighborhood has had dozens of outages over the past few years, the worst of which was nearly a week-long outage during the now-infamous freeze.
So yeah, energy is cheap, but same areas are hit harder than others in terms of reliability.
The energy company’s reasoning for these dozens of small blackouts is “grid upgrades” - that’d be great if true, but who really knows.
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I'm a person living there, haven't had any blackouts for a few years, and pay $0.10/kWh for electricity. What part sucks again?
High growth in demand due to increasing temperatures. This summer is likely exceptional, due to El Nino, but it won't be the last one, and the base temperature will continue to rise due to climate change.
So this was foreseeable, but unforeseen because they didn't wish to. And it will continue to happen, and worse.