Comment by gcr
2 years ago
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.
That's not a capacity issue though, that's your local delivery company having issues. Delivery companies pretty much are still the older style highly regulated utilities. Its an entirely different problem with different incentives than what the above posters were talking about.
Building even 100GW of additional capacity in the state or additional transmission capacity for solar out in the middle of nowhere won't solve the problems your neighbors are facing. Complaining about ERCOT isn't solving the problem, its not ERCOT's role to handle that section. Hold your local delivery provider responsible.
I'd be interested in knowing who that delivery company is if you wouldn't mind sharing.
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?