Weather

Imagine going through the food/essentials shortage last March/April and not learning its a very good idea to keep a weeks worth of food in your house at all times.

rhinohelix said:

Perhaps you know tons. All I can tell you from what I know is that distributors, not retail power companies, that would choose to not transit power to their customers because the spot prices are expensive and pay fines will be destroyed by regulators. It's incredibly highly regulated and monitored. Have you ever worked with ISOs, the SEC, CIP, NERC, FERC, etc?

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I worked for a utility regulated by dozens of State PSCs for decades.

Big Phoenix said:

Imagine going through the food/essentials shortage last March/April and not learning its a very good idea to keep a weeks worth of food in your house at all times.

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I bet they all have tons of frozen toilet paper stored in the basement though.

Sanrith Descartes said:

Texas wholesale electric prices spike more than 10,000% amid outages

The spot price of wholesale electricity on the Texas power grid spiked more than 10,000% on Monday amid a deep freeze across the state and rolling outages among power producers, according to data on the grid operator's website.

www.reuters.com

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This is why every Trading company hedges; at least every Power trading company that is still in business. But the Traders aren't the Generators aren't the Distributors aren't the Retail power companies aren't the ISOs.

Sanrith Descartes said:

I worked for a utility regulated by dozens of State PSCs for decades.

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I don't know what kind of utility where they could choose to not provide their service and decide to pay fines because it was too expensive, and regulators would allow it. Nothing about that makes sense to me at all.

rhinohelix said:

This is why every Trading company hedges; at least every Power trading company that is still in business. But the Traders aren't the Generators aren't the Distributors aren't the Retail power companies aren't the ISOs.

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Hedges come in many forms. From the article...

"ERCOT can be more susceptible to wholesale price spikes because it does not have a capacity market, which pays power plants to be on standby during peak demand and weather emergencies, for example. ERCOT’s model means consumers are not paying for generation that may never be called into action."


I never said there isnt a supply problem. Of course there is. ERCOT, by design, doesnt have the same interconnections to the other regional grids that some others do. This limits there options to purchase excess. Since the cold weather also hammered states north of Tx, what excess electricity they had was already priced through the roof.

Here is my understanding of what happened. You can agree or disagree as you will. The cold front wasn't a tornado. It didn't instantly appear. States like Tx knew it was coming days in advance. They "could" have hedged and bought excess electricity from their partners. They didn't. Now, I do understand the decision, its been a once in a century type of event and they did not feel the hedge would be needed, or they felt they might need it but not to a great extent. Then this thing slammed into TX bringing subzero conditions across a large swath of the state and their own production got fucked in ways they never imagined. If they could have imagined it, they would have hedged late last week. Once states north of Tx got frozen, spot prices soared and by then it was financially too late to pull the trigger without eating an ass-ravaging bill.

Or maybe I am totally wrong. We will find out eventually when the hearings start.

Ishad said:

If you can afford a basement in Texas you can just send your butler out to buy more food.

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Its a hole in the ground. Why do they not have them? It cant be water table too shallow. Is the earth too soft/sandy?

rhinohelix said:

I don't know what kind of utility where they could choose to not provide their service and decide to pay fines because it was too expensive, and regulators would allow it. Nothing about that makes sense to me at all.

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Let me introduce you to PGE...

"California utility Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) is facing fierce backlash from customers and government officials after executing a fire-risk mitigation plan that preemptively shut off power for several days to 730,000 account holders in the state’s northern area that affected up to 2 million people."

Borzak said:

Much of TX the water table is in fact too high. Houston it is very low since it's right at the Gulf. San Antonio and Austin would require blasting into rock. In the hill country around Austin and San Antonio you see a lot of barb wire fences where the post aren't able to be driven into the ground. So they get a post in every so often then it stretches for quite a while with just post that hang down to the top of the rock. On and on.

All of northeast TX like Dallas and such is on shrink swell clay. It's hard enough to build a house on to keep it from tearing itself apart. So they put it on top and let it move. I can't imagine trying to anchor a basement attached to the house in that. Good luck though lol. Also land is much much much cheaper than in the northeast. Easier to have a larger lot and build a larger garage or detached shop than build a basement. I've never lived anywhere in the south that didn't have a shop, sometimes quite large.

They didn't decide to not use basements for just the hell of it.

Shrink swell clay shrinks when it dries, swells when it gets wet. This is a minor when it gets really really dry the cracks can get quite large. So go to TX and build a basement, and in the wet season watch it get crushed to pieces.

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I learned something. The only things I know about Tx is I used to go there for business, there is a lot of land, and the BBQ is really good.

Frenzied Wombat said:

I was at Central Market today and pretty much most fresh produce, all seafood, and most meat was totally out of stock. You basically had the pick of some prepared food, canned stuff, and some frozen/dairy.

I'm definitely going to start investing in some home resiliency and survival type shit. When an entire State can be brought to the precipice of breakdown/anarchy over a few days of Canadian April weather because some retards can decide to take a pass on their power plant winter package, it really makes you wonder what the fuck else is being mismanaged and can blow up in our faces. Throw in a Full Retard federal government and everybody should be working on becoming self sufficient. FFS if there's more snowfall and this went on beyond Friday, we'd be totally fucked. Literal fucking looting/starving and FEMA fucking trailers over a few pathetic inches of snow and cold.

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Canned goods at central market, that shit isn’t food. They only have the weird shit, but the story is pretty much the same at other grocery stores. Fast food places running out of all sorts of shit, restaurants closed, no power, no firewood, no way to cook or eat. Meanwhile I’m just eating off my COVID stash enjoying the vacation and thinking how smart I am. This could go on for years and I’d be okay. Now I know what prepped smugness feels like.

TheBeagle said:

You can't build basements in Texas black clay or limestone (affordably). Also have really high water tables in north Texas. We build a pool we have to leave weep holes in the bottom between gunite and plaster to keep them from popping out of the ground. Always have a couple feet of water in the bottom by the time we plug it up and fill it.

In other news, the essentials are opening back up.
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I tried Whataburger when I visited Tx once and I was like... its ok. I didnt get the cult. Now Chick-fil-A on the other hand.