Of all the places in the US, Texas has the most open market, where new generation succeeds or fails based on profitability.
In that environment, also awash in super cheap natural gas, capitalists are choosing to install battery storage in large amounts.
A lot of people's worldviews need to open up to the new technology landscape for energy. It's a bright future, with cheap, clean renewable power, if we are willing to let the market choose it.
Eventually the tech develops to a price/benefit ratio that makes it dumb not to adopt. Green energy has been there for a few years, mainly with production advances made by China. EVs likewise are advancing at a pace where I think the market on its own would take care of adoption (although I get why China needs to nudge it along due to national security concerns).
Even a fully open market is never completely efficient at minimizing prices. A fully efficient market allows people's preferences to matter. And for a vast number of people, their preference is to struggle against a vast conspiracy of climatologists and cultural Marxists.
Technology can solve questions of producing maximum energy with minimum environmental effect. It cannot solve the problem of just how deeply Americans hate each other.
its not like the reverse problem doesn't exist. Environmentalists and policymakers shy away from obviously good policies because they're too capitalist or dont let them have political controls (carbon auctions a la SOX or NOX auctions, privatized transport like hong kong, singapore, tokyo come to mind)
> Environmentalists and policymakers shy away from obviously good policies because they're too capitalist or dont let them have political controls
Those sorts of argumets are definitely made at the fringes, but they definitely are not the voices of policymakers, and rarely if ever make it into final policy, fortunately.
The extreme leftists hate Democrats for it. See for example, this popular leftist Carl Beijer's view of trying to work with Democrats:
SF had private shuttles for mass transit a few years ago! I'm not sure if it was a pandemic casualty or something else made them go away.
And to this day large employers in the Bay Area run private shuttles for their employees, to get around the terrible balkanization of transit systems in the US.
I would definitely like to see more. But the biggest impediment to that are the cultural and legal status quo of car-dependent urban design, which mightily resists change. At the state and local levels I'm advocating for massive change to planning laws to make density possible, which makes mass transit possible, but it's a long slog and slow and not making much progress.
neither of those is public transit though. For example of well-run systems with inecntive structures aligned with the public interest see ComfortDelGro or MRT
> making the network one of the world's costliest on both a per-kilometre and absolute basis. The system is managed in conformity with a semi-nationalised hybrid regulatory framework; construction and procurement fall under the purview of the Land Transport Authority (LTA), a statutory board of the government that allocates operating concessions to the for-profit private corporations SMRT and SBS Transit. These operators are responsible for asset maintenance on their respective lines, and also run bus services, facilitating operational synchronicity and the horizontal integration of the broader public transportation network.
Privatization doesn’t work for infrastructure that has no competition. That’s why the cheapest broadband is when the city runs and maintains the fiber & companies pay for access to the customer base.
MRT was only nationalized recently. and even so it competes with comfortdelgro.
The ~only parts that are not privatized are land acquisition and expansion. That makes sense. Like if you haven't been to singapore (or Tokyo or Hong Kong) you just don't understand how different public transit is, and you don't understand the scheme behind how it's privatized, and why that creates alignment between the commuter and the company (and how the US fails to do this in every city), then you should go there and see for yourself.
I totally agree with your wider point but I would guess there's federal subsidies involved in the current pricing in Texas.
I think those are a good thing, and there should be more of them and more effort removing the explicit and implicit subsidies on gas that they seek to counterbalance.
(I'm also now wondering how much the solar panels paid in tariffs and if the two government interventions cancel out)
But probably worth acknowledging they exist. Here's a right wing take on it:
Lazard's, also points out that solar is the cheapest energy source (on average, this varies by geography).
Fossil fuel subsidies are much larger than renewable energy subsidies, as a total dollar amount, but then right now we get much more of our energy from fossil fuels.
> For fossil fuels, the nature of subsidies differs. Tax provisions like the expensing of intangible drilling costs defer expenses rather than involve direct payments. Critics argue that these measures should not be classified as subsidies since they do not provide government cash infusions. However, any form of subsidy, whether through direct spending or tax incentives, skews the energy market and undermines the principle of free enterprise.
The most shocking thing is the battery, to me. Because the battery subsidy is at most 1-2 years of price drops. So if today, batteries are cost effective, but only because of subsidy, in a short time they will be cost-effective without any subsidy.
However, if we want cheap energy we should keep the subsidies in place. Batteries and solar get cheaper the more we build of them, so the faster we make the investment, the faster they get cheaper, and the sooner we have a cheaper energy source, which all in all saves us massive amounts of money.
The "Inflation Reduction Act" was a funny name for Biden's on-shoring of massive amounts of factories for renewable energy, but I think in the end it will stop future inflation, long after he has died. Energy price spikes are frequently the cause of inflation, but once we have the coming energy abundance, and most of the cost of electricity is in storage rather than generation, we don't have to worry as much about global geopolitics cutting off our supply. The worst will be a week-long shortage due to a continent-wide weather event that we have not yet seen the likes of, but likely will in the future due to climate change. Or, a volcano eruption that also at the same time destroys crop production, in which case lower electricity levels won't be much of a concern...
The name was specifically chosen because of that effect. I believe it was based on the work of Saul Griffith who has a PDF here explaining it:
"Electrification is
anti-inflationary."
> Unpacking the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act: What was
in it? What could it mean for Australia?
> Clean electrification is the transformation of our energy economy away from one based on
low-cost fossil-fuelled machines that require expensive future commitments to fossil-fuels,
to higher-cost electric machines that are powered by clean electricity. This turns the energy
economy from one of fuels to one of finance, and the beauty of finance is that it locks in the
cost of something for the period of that finance. It is literally anti-inflationary as can be seen in
Figure 2.
The natural gas situation is still sketchy because the incentive to build more capacity is very low, but the natural gas alongside coal electricity generation is know as baseband power. Very reliable inertial generators (turbines) smooth over the unstable electrical from wind turbines or solar.
As far as battery capacity goes, that's also sketchy because ERCOT is allowing dangerous risky lithium packs to be installed in a tightly packed together industrial space optimized way that could result in disaster when one unit catches fire, spreading to the whole site. Better would be magnetically suspended flywheels in a hard vacuum buried under ground. These are more ecological and have the same baseband quality as a turbine constant spin generator, and require very little energy to up-keep. I would say a hybrid way of having these flywheels in large numbers with on-site lithium batteries to provide site power, and line-leveling as the relays switch over to the flywheels, similar to how batteries in a data center last just long enough to let the diesel gen spin up...
The problem is if all these renewable eco friendly sources crowd out the dirty more reliable sources, then there will eventually not be any reliable sources. It's a nasty paradox.
> because the incentive to build more capacity is very low,
The incentive for new gas generation is the same as for new solar generation: selling electricity profitably on the grid. If you are saying that new gas generation has trouble competing with batteries and solar, I would agree.
I would go further and say that new solar and batteries are cheaper than merely the fuel and operating costs of many existing fossil fuel plants. Especially coal. And a lot of gas too, particularly the peaker plants that burn for short amounts of time to capture price spikes on the market.
> Very reliable inertial generators (turbines) smooth over the unstable electrical from wind turbines or solar.
There's two very different concepts here: inertial generators for frequency regulation and supplying reactive power, which solar does not generate natively, but is now with grid-forming inverters. Also, batteries have been serving frequency regulation for more than a decade, starting in the PJM market. The need for inertial generation has been replaced even with very old and expensive battery technology.
The second concept of "reliable" is dispatchable power: can you put power on the grid when it's needed? Batteries also solve this, and are being deployed, profitably, in Texas, as opposed to new gas generation.
> As far as battery capacity goes, that's also sketchy because ERCOT is allowing dangerous risky lithium packs to be installed in a tightly packed together industrial space optimized way that could result in disaster when one unit catches fire, spreading to the whole site.
That's a fairly minor implementation detail, and the installers are taking on all that risk on their own, as they will lose everything if there's a fire that spreads.
A battery going up in smoke is still far better than the amounts of natural gas that get burned in its place.
> Better would be magnetically suspended flywheels in a hard vacuum buried under ground. These are more ecological and have the same baseband quality as a turbine constant spin generator, and require very little energy to up-keep. I would say a hybrid way of having these flywheels in large numbers with on-site lithium batteries to provide site power, and line-leveling as the relays switch over to the flywheels, similar to how batteries in a data center last just long enough to let the diesel gen spin up...
Flywheels are a completely impractical technology that doesn't scale and is far too expensive. Especially in vacuum underground.
Inverters are a far better solution than fly-wheels: cheaper, more battle-tested, actually deployed in practice instead of just in the lab, and widespread.
Vistra energy built a battery storage plant in Moss Landing, Ca that recently went up in flames completely destroying the entire plant and dumping toxic chemicals into the local estuary. Ask the residents there if they thought it was “better than burning ng.” They are trying to build another one a hundred miles south in Morro bay.
There are good ways to do this but using small communities in another state as R&D isn’t one of them.
I'm one of the residents nearby that's full of concern. Ask me about the people in Moss Landing that had to repaint so often because of the natural gas plant that got replaced by the batteries.
People are full of environmental concern for batteries (good!) but rarely question the status quo.
We don't yet know the impact of the Vistra disaster, but it's being monitored closely and we will find out. Freaking out before there is any reason to freak out is a specialty in my area. Interesting examples are WiFi sensitive people that have no problem with standing in the sun. Or the X-ray technician that is concerned about cell phone towers causing cancer.
If there are any negative effects from the fire, they will be found, but they haven't been found yet.
> Moss Landing, Ca that recently went up in flames completely destroying the entire plant and dumping toxic chemicals into the local estuary.
While the Moss Landing BESS does seem to have been one of the worst built anywhere on the planet, the recent fire there did not (a) "completely destroy the entire plant" nor (b) "dumping toxic chemicals into the local estuary".
When a modern vehicle (let alone a manufactured house) goes up in flames (which happens fairly often), it releases significantly more toxic gases than a BESS fire.
These corrections bought to you by your friendly not-in-your-neighborhood IFSAC Firefighter II.
> As far as battery capacity goes, that's also sketchy because ERCOT is allowing dangerous risky lithium packs to be installed in a tightly packed together industrial space optimized way that could result in disaster when one unit catches fire, spreading to the whole site.
Completely false. There have been fires at in battery storage systems. They have never, ever escaped the containment of the metal unit that comprises a given module. There is really no mechanism for a fire to spread either.
But this data fully destroys the idea of a binary economic choice presented by the current political landscape. It's not renewables vs fossil fuels. It's renewables AND fossil fuels and whatever else we can use to make stuff move. The whole ideological split is a fabricated culture war. The economy demands energy, full stop.
Another thing to be wary of in this title: headlines like this are written specifically to sound like renewables are winning this ideological battle against fossil fuels. It's so vital to understand: that is not happening at all. Renewables and fossil fuels capacity are BOTH increasing (though renewables at a faster rate - don't confuse the derivative with the scalar value of interest). We are not "replacing" fossil fuels by any metric, and saying so is outright greenwashing. The atmosphere responds to CO2 concentration, not good intentions.
I don't know what "idea of binary economic choice presented by the current political landscape means." Are you saying that the political sphere is saying that only one of natural gas or renewables could be built? If that's what you're saying, I don't think it's a widespread idea, it's just the Republican idea spread to straw man against building any renewables at all. If it's something else, I'm very interested!
It takes a long time for people to adapt to new reality, and I would expect natural gas to continue to be build even after it is no longer economically feasible until people learn the hard way.
Also, batteries are continuously dropping in cost. Gas might be able to reach a tiny decrease, but it does not benefit from the continual improvement of technology like batteries do.
We are not replacing fossil fuels, yet, but only becuase energy use is expanding, and the energy capacity additions are eating up our entire production capacity of renewables.
As we build out more and more factories for renewables, and as existing natural gas turbines reach end of life, the switchover will happen.
Globally, fossil fuels are barely expanding. The IEA, a famously pro-fossil fuel org, thinks that China reached peak fossil fuel consumption in 2024, and will decrease fossil fuel use in the future even as every consumption grows.
IEA also thinks that more than half of electricity generation will be carbon free, worldwide, by 2030:
We are not transitioning the energy system fast enough to get the cheapest possible energy, or to meet reasonable climate goals, but that's entirely because of politics instead of technical or economic feasibility.
> idea of binary economic choice presented by the current political landscape
The media and US political parties frame our energy futures as either renewable or fossil fueled. Do I even need to explain this? Compare the official climate positions of the two major US political parties. Read the headline, it literally positions the story of renewable growth in relation to other energy sources.
The real story is that both renewables and oil and gas are growing to satisfy the ever-increasing demand for energy. We evidently need growth in both just to keep up.
> that's entirely because of politics instead of technical or economic feasibility
True. We've tried working within the system for decades, it has clearly not worked. Perhaps we should examine the status quo more critically? The earth's atmosphere doesn't give a shit about our intentions, good or bad. Just the pollution we emit. What we need desperately is a real strategy for emissions reduction based on physical evidence. Instead, we have the "green new deal" and "drill baby drill" - both of which are positions in the great US culture war, not evidence-based strategies for the energy market.
Thankfully there are rational scientist and engineers working on our energy system - they don't have the luxury of picking sides in a culture war. They use the best of renewables and gas to build resilience into the system while gradually increasing renewables year over year. There is no ideological choice to be made - so long as we demand energy, we need growth in renewables and oil. Acknowledging that fact is politically toxic to both the left and the right.
As far as a political binary, only a single side has been disproven, the Republican side that says that renewables and storage can't meet market needs. The democratic proposition, in policy, in rhetoric, in action, has always been a transition from fossil fuels to renewables and storage, which this ERCOT news is completely consistent with.
The future of resilience is batteries, not gas. Most of these new gas generators will be stranded assets within a decade.
Additionally the part of the picture missing in this announcement is retirements, which are of course all fossil fuel.
And I'm dancing around the point - the problem is demand for energy, not fossil fuels. Reducing emissions means reducing demand - an end to economic growth as we know it. Again, politically toxic.
The green new deal envisions us driving around in EVs.
The drill baby drill folks picture us driving around in our pickups.
And the reality (if we want any hope of meeting our climate goals) is probably no more driving, or at least significantly less. We saw what covid lockdown did to our supply chains. Do we really think we could handle a drastic reduction in mobility and economic demand? I don't see that happening anywhere today, do you? I see us getting less resilient to oil decline by the year. You can no longer live a normal life in most American towns without a car. Want to eat and send your kids to school? You drive. We're not prepared to have a conversation about consuming less, let alone actually achieving it IRL.
> In the spring of 2024, Texas’ installation of utility scale solar outpaced California’s, and jumped from 1,900 megawatts in 2019 to over 20,000 megawatts in 2024. As a result, solar met nearly 50 percent of the state’s peak power demand on some days.
That’s impressive. And fairly green-friendly for a state that gets a bad rap for being in bed with oil/gas
My biggest fear is that Republican political correctness will come to over-regulate and stop the deployment of clean energy. You can already see it at the national level. Texas will have to decide if they like money and the free market more than being politically correct.
You can already see this conflict in all the areas where the new factories have been built from Biden's IRA. These factories generally raise wages quite a bit, invigorate communities that feel like they have been forgotten, but that it's clean energy doing the good is kept on the down-low. To mix metaphors: don't poke the bear, lest the bear cuts off its nose to spite its face.
Democrat political correctness is the one that's killing all of these in California right now. Environmentalism requires that solar and wind be banned. And Nevada's brand of environmentalism requires fighting geothermal.
Well most of the environmental laws in the way of this were passed by California Republicans, and then expanded by the courts (whatever partisanship that is), and broadly supported by Democrats.
But today it is not "politically incorrect" to advocate for changes to the environmental regulations for California Democrats. And they are definitely pursuing changes to regulations!
So you are very correct that regulations are in the way, and that Democrats are in power, but you are wrong that it's politically incorrect to change the regulations.
A universal phenomenon of California democrats is that they're always advocating and pursuing changes but never changing anything. It's been some twenty years of CEQA reform pursuit. Democratic Party control: Legislature from 1996-present day; executive from 1999-2003, 2011-present day.
In California politics, only Republicans pass things. Democrats always pursue and advocate.
All of the landmark CA laws (CEQA, CCCA, CCA, CESA, CDPA) were passed by Democratic legislatures. Most of them were signed by Reagan (who subsequently repudiated all of those laws as President) or Pete Wilson (who did not). The CSRA and CSGMA are the only two major CA environmental laws recent enough to be signed by a Democratic governor.
Notably, by today's political standards, (gubernatorial-era) Reagan and Wilson would be characterized as moderate Democrats.
The commission that regulates this (the Texas railroad commission) is fully republican as is most of their legislature/govenrment. The republicans are in charge of all this
And at the moment additions to the grid are mostly an open free market. My fear is that they will change that to stop renewable energy. Many places that are extremely anti-renewable for partisan political reasons, such as Montana, have been caught on tape changing regulations to highly regulate and stymie solar. Texas has not been that way and I think there's probably a >50% chance that Texas Republicans on that commission will continue to choose the free market over blocking renewables. But there is a risk.
TX resident here: valid concern, but there are big moneyholders in TX investing in wind and solar here, and that has a tendency to override political orthodoxy. Lots of rich people who want their solar and wind investments to pay off, and they have pull in TX GOP.
In reality, the market will do it for them as the datacenter and energy boom requires more energy than green can provide and the money will flow anew to nuclear and fission.
Right. As much as I like nuclear, you could overbuild solar or wind by a factor of 3 in half the time and pay the whole project off before the nuclear project even gets finished.
I am not violently allergic to nuclear, and am mindful that there will be places it is needed, although it’s going to be incredibly expensive and time consuming to build where needed. Texas has enormous wind and solar potential, they can skip it.
Nuclear power is fundamentally incompatible with a for-profit energy sector. It makes zero sense as a profit seeking CEO to invest tens of billions of dollars and over a decade of development to something that might pay for itself over the next half century if ever. Especially when you can build wind farms that turn profits in under 16 months and solar even more quickly these days. Maybe nuclear makes sense for a country's long term energy security. But that literally has no bearing on what happens with US energy investments.
There's also the huge amount of economic risk in each construction project, which is too much financial risk for an entity the size of a utility to bear.
I would argue that it makes little more sense for a nation state to take on that economic risk, either. Risk can be priced, and the bill for many the risks of nuclear are already picked up by others due to the laws around nuclear. If, even with those massive subsidies, nuclear is too economically risky for utilities, I would argue that it's too costly overall for anyone. Or at least a poor decision.
Until there's some major innovation in nuclear construction, the risk should be reserved for those with no better options (e.g. Finland, maybe the UK, etc.)
Rio Tinto is moving smelters to renewables and batteries in Australia.
I've yet to see anything solid in this latest talk of nuclear renaissance (which they talk about every year) that can't be put down to silicon valley nerds moving in weird political circles that are irrationally attracted to nuclear power.
I think it's one of those "be contrarian for the sake of it" positions. People think they sound smart for going nuclear because it ticks a lot of boxes at the surface level.
Then you realise it costs multiple times more than renewables and batteries (ain't that the real revolution), takes over a decade to build and imposes large obligations on the owners.
Solar panels are a commodity and they are getting cheaper. That will continue regardless of which political party is in charge.
Moving the solar supply chain to be domestic is a massive undertaking. First Solar, one of the stronger US companies, will be at at 50/50 manufacturing in the US versus not:
"We inaugurated our new $1.1 billion Alabama facility, which when, fully scaled, adds 3.5 gigawatts of vertically integrated nameplate solar manufacturing capacity. The start of commercial operation at the Alabama facility, along with our under construction Louisiana facility, which remains on track to begin operations in the second half of 2025, keeps us on course to achieve our projection of over 14 gigawatts of annual U.S. nameplate capacity and over 25 gigawatts of global nameplate capacity by 2026." https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2024/10/29/fi...
You are correct that it will take investment to continue to build factories here instead of Malaysia or India, but the factories will be built regardless.
My specific fear is that connecting those cheap solar panels to the grid will be the hard part. I have no doubt that they will continue to plummet in price, and than new innovative installation methods will continue to cause installation prices to drop, etc. etc.
The technology for a 100% renewable energy system for all of humanity is about 90%-95% there, the biggest impediment is political and not technical now. (Hard-to-decarbonize areas like industry is close but not there yet, and we can do all the other areas while new solutions are found for cement, chemicals, etc.)
My personal view is that rooftop solar and home batteries are putting a price roof on what people accept their electricity bills to cost.
As the solar and storage costs continue to plummet even if you can’t sell electricity to the grid we will increasingly see more and more homes with near zero electricity usage for much of the year.
No matter how much you attempt to force fossil fuels down these people throats there’s nothing you can do if people simply don’t pull energy from the grid. Then the expensive facilities sit unused.
Offloading these costs on the voters will quickly become politically untenable.
There's plenty that they can do to block solar for people that don't completely disconnect from the grid. And in some places it's illegal to disconnect from the grid, they can force that too.
To block solar, some states are putting high fees on base connections, and low per kWh costs. If the grid-connection fees subsidize the per-kWh generation fees, it breaks the economics of lowering your consumption from the grid with your own generation.
The big solar farms are really amazing in scale. The blue shimmer of the panels look just like water from far away and they’re so big it literally looks like a lake in the distance. There’s a few just outside the Permian basin like this that I’ve seen. It’s funny that they’re right near the big fracking operations but I guess that’s because of logistics, land availability, and grid access.
Edit: I want one so bad, something cool about being a farmer but farming photons instead of plants and animals.
Especially for grazing, raised photovoltaic allows the photons to be harvested along with allowing goats or cows to graze the landscape.
Crops can also be grown in between rows of solar.
This arrangement also mitigates the often destructive effect that large utility scale solar has on the landscape.
The landscape degradation is why having generation, and transmission, be as locally contained as possible is the best technical solution. But utilities often fight this, since they make money on large utility scale project, and loose money on building and neighborhood scale generation and distribution.
As always, the middle way is the best. Too bad nuance is not longer an allowed perspective...
Texas resident here. Texas has a few advantages with wind and solar:
1) most years (with notable exceptions), peak electricity happens when the sun is shining
2) west Texas is very windy
One of the reasons that TX was caught flat-footed a few years ago in a cold snap, was that in a decade we went from oil-and-coal power generation to mostly natgas (which froze up), wind (which froze up, albeit not as much as the natgas), and solar (not working at night). It was the first very hard freeze under the new power mix. Not so long ago TX was talking about "clean coal"; now it is natgas, wind, and solar.
Texas energy wasn't prepared for severe freezes. You can buy the gear to run natural gas pipelines and wind turbines in arctic conditions. Natural gas has to be dried out near the source in cold climates.[1] It's water mixed with the gas that's the problem. Wind turbines with blade heaters run fine in Norway. It's a factory option. (The turbine itself provides the power to run heaters. One source says about 1/7 of output power is needed for blade heating in icing conditions.)
There were many true arguments that were twisted into political narratives: “the sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow”. What they left out is “the natural gas does not always flow”…
Another advantage is that Texas renewable assets are west of Texas population centers, which blunts the "duck curve" problem of evening peak load. California, unfortunately, does not enjoy that geographic advantage.
My take is the accounting economics has shifted to solar and wind. As a result panicked fossil fuel companies and petrostates are spewing a lot of agitprop to gaslight schmucks into continuing to use fossil fuels. But that's not going to slow down the accountants.
It's unfortunate that Texas gets a bad rap. The actual thing they did is deregulate their (residential) electricity market, which only Massachusetts followed suit with.
By separating what you pay for transmission (monopoly) from generation (free market), it created a persistent demand for more/better/cheaper supply.
I know your comment is sarcastic, but yes, of course.
I consider myself someone with "liberal values", but I don't understand why so many liberals like to pretend that the reality of economic incentives don't exist. Sure, it would be nice if we could all sing kumbaya together and build things, but the real world largely doesn't work that way. And it's not just "big developers" - most people would choose the more polluting energy source if it saved them 5 cents.
Other similar situation: so many people in "liberal cities" like to rail against "big evil developers" when it comes to housing, and as a result they have a giant housing shortage that is responsible for tons of social ills. In Austin we've built a shit ton of housing, especially rental, by letting developers build, and surprise surprise housing and rental costs in Austin have fallen a ton since their (admittedly ridiculous) peak.
We're not pretending it doesn't exist, but the failures of Texas power grid have been pretty obvious the last few years with major power failures, rampant price gouging, and deaths attributable to these failures - so the "oh the incentives are fixing it!" when no states needs to have those problems is looking with rose tinted glasses.
> Griddy advised customers to remove themselves from their system during the storm, and says that over 9,700 accounts did by February 15. On February 17, they asked for PUC approval to switch the remaining customers to a traditional energy provider, but the PUC, which was overwhelmed by the situation, was unable to discuss the matter.
Outages do cause deaths, that is for sure. PG&E has killed a lot of people by that metric and unfortunately PG&E's problems are a little harder to fix.
These are still problems that can largely be solved by applying the right economic incentives.
For example, during the 2021 winter storm and outage, a huge problem was that no power producers had any incentive to weatherize their systems, resulting in a huge chunk of them all going offline at the same time. It seems more than reasonable to require producers to have some minimal level of weatherization, and to provide incentives to producers that have better weatherization.
This is kinda my point - I'm not arguing for a totally deregulated free-for-all, as the unregulated free market is notoriously bad at dealing with "black swan" events. But that doesn't mean that sensible regulations can't be put in place that still use economic incentives to achieve their goals.
> These are still problems that can largely be solved by applying the right economic incentives.
>
> It seems more than reasonable to require producers to have some minimal level of weatherization
Regulation on a minimal level of weatherization is not an economic incentive.
This is basically an "all Internet arguments are over semantics" response.
I.e., if you want to participate in the electricity producer market in TX, you need to have X level of weatherization. Call that regulation, fine, but essentially every private, non-governmental-run market has a set of rules that all participants need to adhere to in order to participate in the market, and the penalty for non-compliance is getting kicked out of the market. That's basically what I'm arguing for here.
Great link. As a liberal California resident, there's a lot about the governance of Texas that I like a lot. From their permitting regime for renewables, to their high property taxes, there's a lot that California should adopt that would make our state function better.
This why I find our political tribalism so frustrating, even moreso now that I see (primarily young) people trying to use "centrist" as a dirty word.
Texas has actually done a lot better at producing supposedly "liberal outcomes" by acknowledging the reality of economic incentives. We've built a ton of renewables. We've also built a ton of housing that have shown the stark contrast to the idiotic housing policies of California. I'll also give a shout-out to the "Sunset Commission" of the TX legislature, which reviews government/regulatory bodies every 12 years to ensure they're still fulfilling their original mission.
At the same time, we have idiotic laws that force women to leave the state to get healthcare that will save their lives. Our educational financing system is a disaster.
Point being I don't consider myself a "centrist", I just want to choose policies that actually work, regardless of tribalism.
I have to admire Texas politicians for opposing "green energy", going so far as to blame their 2021 power crisis on The Green New Deal, while also simultaneously investing heavily in and reaping the benefits from "green energy". The unapologetic hypocrisy has to be respected.
The difference is that private industry is buying what's effective while politicians mouth off. This is one of the reasons we should let the "free market" control things where we can, since they are compelled to make sensible decisions for efficiency reasons, unlike the government.
They are compelled to make decisions for efficiency reasons as much as the government is. Companies make boneheaded decisions based on ideology all the time.
Additionally every time I hear someone claim that companies running everything will be more efficient, when I dive into their beliefs I find out that they expect organizations they call “governments” are required to do many tasks that would not be required of organizations they call “corporations” and that is where all the “efficiency” comes from.
If this was supposedly so much more of an “efficiently system then why has Texas experienced years of outage causing problems in their electrical grid?
We live in a world where half of elected officials want to stop the rollout of renewables for ideological reasons and regularly push nuclear power as an alternative, despite making zero economic sense.
I'm not saying the government can't be efficient, but taxes represent a cash flow that is close to completely unbound to the results of their spending, so it's much easier for them to be used poorly depending on who's in charge.
Cool, you can loose a shareholder vote too and have a company go off and do something you think is dumb and therefore “inefficient”.
Part of the point I’m trying to drive to is that many of the problems people have with governments are actually problems with organizations operating at scale
I'm very very happy that green energy has gotten so effective, but what if it hadn't? Then private industry would be off polluting as much as possible. Monetary efficiency is often not aligned with resource and pollution efficiency.
(And obviously that can be largely fixed with a carbon tax, but good luck getting that to happen.)
I am beyond overjoyed that a city somewhere (Austin) did the stupid simple thing and simply added a bunch of housing when prices went up. You can clearly see the graphs, where after 2020, prices shoot up, then housing starts shoot up, then prices drop back down to 2020 levels.
I would say I am progressive politically but the ostensibly progressive mindset that led to denying that housing supply could help with the cost of housing has been crazy harmful. Even with the newfound acknowledgement that housing production is necessary, it's going to be harder and more expensive to catch up - peakier demand for trades labor and materials also drives up prices!!
This is a really simplistic view. It’s not just policy. In Texas, the vast majority of land is privately owned (only 2% is public land), so zoning is the only thing preventing buildout. Most of the geography is flat, there are huge expanses of empty fields all around Austin, and the weather is buildable nearly year round. There is also a tremendous amount of cheap labor due to the proximity to Mexico and the lack of minimum wages / border policy enforcement / etc. there are so many factors that make Texas cheap to build in that aren’t true universally in America.
Another key point, look up net migration in Austin. During the pandemic and remote work, everyone and their brother wanted to move to Austin, it was super trendy and a lot of tech was moving there. Look it up now. In Q4 2023 not only did grow to slow but it reversed to net outflow. Thats a massive difference in demand for housing and a massive difference in supply of housing. [1]
Yes, more homes got built, but there were many other factors at play than something simple like “let them build houses”.
True but also doesn't explain the Austin housing market. Austin added more new apartments just east of downtown in 5 years than San Francisco built in the entire 1990s. The differences between pro-housing and deeply anti-housing local attitudes do not come down to geography.
Thank you for the nuance! I suspected that it was much easier to actually get the housing built but wasn't clear on the migration flows.
Either way it seems like housing prices started to decline spring 2022, about 1 year after the massive spike in building permits started in earnest.
There are a lot of impediments to doing the same thing in say, the Northeast, where I am. Labor is insanely expensive. This land has been occupied by city for hundreds of years, and greenfield does not exist nearby, nor is there the appetite to Ctrl C Ctrl V build massive subdivisions, especially out of reach of transit here.
Austin proves a relationship between supply and housing prices, but it will always be incumbent upon cities and states to pave the way for massive construction of housing in times of need. I think that long term, that means working to develop the labor pool and participation in the trades, streamlining permitting and inspection (I just finished a gut reno and this was a fucking nightmare), and yes, changing zoning so the mass housing projects actually can get built.
Young people are correct. Centrism doesn’t lead to policies that work at this point because the right wing is unwilling to come to the center. (Yes, it’s the right wing, not both sides. The left has compromised itself into having no political impact whatsoever.)
I think we need some new terminology or concepts. Personally I'd like a happiness or customer satisfaction focussed policy, not in a deep philosophical way but like asking on a scale of 1 to 5 how do you rate Texas's energy policy, how do you rate California's and similar. Then try to do the best one. It has the advantage that it's sensible to optimise the numbers and try to get 4.5+ on everything whereas with right-left politics there's nothing very sensible to optimize.
Actually maybe I should build something - like a ratings site.
The nice thing about income taxes is that when your income increases, which increases the amount of tax you owe, your ability to afford that tax also goes up due to that income increase.
With property taxes you don't have that coupling between changes in income and changes in the tax. That can make a property tax way more painful.
Except the lowest income classes don’t own property and pay no property taxes directly. Considering renters also pay less in Texas than Cali, it seems a pretty un-regressive regime.
If your income tax goes up a lot, you have a ton more wealth. Which means that a small downsizing to match the same tax level leaves you with a bunch of cash.
That's exactly what should happen in a productive economy: big cash payments to give up underutilized land to somebody who can make better use of it.
People talk about taxing granny out of her house, but they conveniently forget to mention that granny is keeping half a dozen people homeless by hoarding an underutilized property.
> People talk about taxing granny out of her house, but they conveniently forget to mention that granny is keeping half a dozen people homeless by hoarding an underutilized property.
That’s a distasteful and predatory way to speak of someone who rightfully bought her property, possibly a widow, and just wants to live in peace versus having someone (business or gov) try to break the rules to take her property.
It is far more distasteful and predatory to hide behind widows with a fundamentally unfair system. Whoever wants to take away the opportunity of others, let them pay. It's not hard.
It's far more distasteful to ignore the needs of everyone to give a very minor convenience to somebody with a lot of wealth.
Winston Churchill on this sort of old and wrong political argument about widows:
> People talk about taxing granny out of her house, but they conveniently forget to mention that granny is keeping half a dozen people homeless by hoarding an underutilized property
Where are you getting that from?
In most cases when granny sells her house and moves due to high taxes the buyer will be a single family that will live in the house. In the vast majority of cases that family will have less than half a dozen people, and in the vast majority of cases they will not have been homeless before.
Texas has always been ruled by the extractive industries, so property taxes essentially make taxation a non-issue for the people who own those industries, as their property is owned by corporations that have a variety of hocus hocus to offset tax liability. Property, sales and excise taxes are regressive and penalize poor folks. They are great for rich people.
In a place like New York, Massachusetts, or California, you have alot of intellectual property driving the economy, so you need to tax income. New York's discretionary budget is essentially derived from income taxes on a few thousand people. New York/Mass vs. California shows why each thing is important -- NY and Mass are leaders for K-12, California is ranked like 35-40 among states.
Local control of property taxes mean that the former can fund education effectively, which they do outside of the hood. California schools are stuck with trying to extract dollars from the state legislature, as the boomers effectively pay no property tax.
I don't think California or Massachusetts needs to tax income, certainly not at the level they currently do. Look at Washington, with its lack of income tax yet very strong intellectual economy, not only in software but also a growing biotech scene.
CA, NY, and MA all have terrible problems with housing and land use in general, largely caused by poor allocation of land due to extremely poor taxation.
Land in Manhattan, Cambridge, the Bay Area, and Los Angeles is some of the most productive land in the world, but the extraction happens because of the network effects of bundling people together.
By taxing the land rents, poor uses could be replaced by far better ones, increasing the land value and economic output even further.
Property tax isn't quite as good as a land value tax, but it's at least getting towards taxing the right thing.
Most people radically overestimate California income taxes because they fundamentally fail to understand how progressive taxation works. No one talks about Oklahoma having a high income tax, but everyone making under $50k per year would pay more income tax in Oklahoma than California. Quite amazing how that's not "high tax" and perfectly okay. Meanwhile, practically no one in these comments would be exposed to a California 12.3% income tax because it only applies to income above roughly $1.5M/year if married. My income taxes were lower in California than in Iowa at comparable times in my life, yet no one ever used Iowa as an example of high income taxes.
The biggest "high tax" component of California's system is that capital gains gets taxed as if it were regular income.
This was another California Republican idea, namely Reagan's, and I think he implemented it nationally when he was president too.
This means that in boom cycles with lots of IPOs and acquisitions, the California state coffers are bulging with money, but in a broad economic downturn there are a few news cycles of "California has a $XYZ billion state budget deficit" before the new budget is set since that deficit is how the new budget is set (no news articles on the balancing, though). There's a big appetite for anti-California news and I have little patience for the assholes who gobble up that misinformation...
> Most people radically overestimate California income taxes because they fundamentally fail to understand how progressive taxation works.
Most people radically overestimate California income taxes because of propaganda by the narrow group of people paying top marginal rates directed at the broad group of people who pay closer to the median rate, because the former group wants the latter group to act against its own interests.
> The actual thing they did is deregulate their (residential) electricity market, which only Massachusetts followed suit with.
California did that for a few years. Auctions every half hour, everyone pays the spot price. It was too exploitable by energy traders and resulted in blackouts. Also, PG&E went bankrupt, after a century as a regulated utility.
The current system trades energy mostly on a day-ahead basis, which is more stable.
> Texas will have great energy infrastructure because they let developers build it.
Ask Houston about letting developers build with little oversight. Or, ask the home owners that bought some of that property.
Ask homeowners that live on wells that have become polluted because of Texas being in bed with oil and the little oversight applied. The rap is well deserved not unfortunate.
Land use isn't nearly as free-wheeling as people both here and elsewhere like to pretend. There's loads of restrictions, both good and bad, and permitting is not quite the nightmare as it is in (from what I hear) New York City, but it's still no walk in the park if you are trying to do anything unusual.
Developers build in floodplains in every state. What’s your point? If you live in a floodplain your insurance makes you buy flood insurance. There’s entire cities in Florida built on former swamps
Something readers need to know to interpret a comparison between California and Texas is that Texas uses way, way more electricity than California. Part of the reason why California need not keep pace with Texas in this race is that California pursues efficiency standards and dispersed solar generation to a greater degree. CAISO's peak load hasn't grown much in the last 20 years. The 2024 peak load minute was below the 2006 peak load minute, despite a 23% larger population. ERCOT dispatches twice as much power per capita.
and moreover inasmuch as their oil/gas is replacing coal and even sulfur-heavy sources like athabasca sands, it's some of the cleanest (net energy to extract, transport, and refine) carbon energy available.
And to add to that, power is almost always the number that is reported/counted so watts is usually correct. That might seem strange since batteries store energy, but in terms of the service they provide to the grid power in/out is more important than storage at least for now.
> In the addled, quasi-imperial units of the US, shouldn't this be megawatt*hours?
No, that's actually megawatts. Grid assets are measured primarily by power, because the grid is operated on dispatch of power.
For storage, the storage capacity doesn't matter from the grid side. Grid operators have an ever-changing mix of resources that bid into the market, and select the winning bids, based on their bid price and power amount, for fixed duration dispatch. When the battery operator is out of power, they drop out of bidding.
If for some reason the energy content is your only concern, and an article doesn't mention the energy capacity, multiple the power quantity by 4 hours. That is the median amount of duration at full power for batteries, due to cost-optimal design. The very first few installations on the grid may be smaller, as in only 1-2 hours, because there's a fair amount of power demand at the beginning for frequency regulation, which requires very short duration. But as more gets deployed, frequency regulation is no longer needed, and 4 hours tends to dominate. I've seen a few 6 hour duration installations too, which may make sense depending on the specific local market needs.
At my company, Tyba, we build software to operate utility-scale batteries in wholesale markets (including ERCOT).
If you're interested in applying software/ML/optimization to energy markets, building distributed systems that interface with power markets, or working on problems that directly impact grid decarbonization, we're hiring engineers (in person and remote)!
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadIn that environment, also awash in super cheap natural gas, capitalists are choosing to install battery storage in large amounts.
A lot of people's worldviews need to open up to the new technology landscape for energy. It's a bright future, with cheap, clean renewable power, if we are willing to let the market choose it.
Technology can solve questions of producing maximum energy with minimum environmental effect. It cannot solve the problem of just how deeply Americans hate each other.
Those sorts of argumets are definitely made at the fringes, but they definitely are not the voices of policymakers, and rarely if ever make it into final policy, fortunately.
The extreme leftists hate Democrats for it. See for example, this popular leftist Carl Beijer's view of trying to work with Democrats:
https://www.carlbeijer.com/p/political-allies-dont-have-to-l...
They can barely bring themselves to work with liberals, but try to at times.
And to this day large employers in the Bay Area run private shuttles for their employees, to get around the terrible balkanization of transit systems in the US.
I would definitely like to see more. But the biggest impediment to that are the cultural and legal status quo of car-dependent urban design, which mightily resists change. At the state and local levels I'm advocating for massive change to planning laws to make density possible, which makes mass transit possible, but it's a long slog and slow and not making much progress.
> making the network one of the world's costliest on both a per-kilometre and absolute basis. The system is managed in conformity with a semi-nationalised hybrid regulatory framework; construction and procurement fall under the purview of the Land Transport Authority (LTA), a statutory board of the government that allocates operating concessions to the for-profit private corporations SMRT and SBS Transit. These operators are responsible for asset maintenance on their respective lines, and also run bus services, facilitating operational synchronicity and the horizontal integration of the broader public transportation network.
Privatization doesn’t work for infrastructure that has no competition. That’s why the cheapest broadband is when the city runs and maintains the fiber & companies pay for access to the customer base.
The ~only parts that are not privatized are land acquisition and expansion. That makes sense. Like if you haven't been to singapore (or Tokyo or Hong Kong) you just don't understand how different public transit is, and you don't understand the scheme behind how it's privatized, and why that creates alignment between the commuter and the company (and how the US fails to do this in every city), then you should go there and see for yourself.
I think those are a good thing, and there should be more of them and more effort removing the explicit and implicit subsidies on gas that they seek to counterbalance.
(I'm also now wondering how much the solar panels paid in tariffs and if the two government interventions cancel out)
But probably worth acknowledging they exist. Here's a right wing take on it:
https://www.texaspolicyresearch.com/federal-energy-subsidies...
I think Lazard has info on costs before and after incentives.
Fossil fuel subsidies are much larger than renewable energy subsidies, as a total dollar amount, but then right now we get much more of our energy from fossil fuels.
> For fossil fuels, the nature of subsidies differs. Tax provisions like the expensing of intangible drilling costs defer expenses rather than involve direct payments. Critics argue that these measures should not be classified as subsidies since they do not provide government cash infusions. However, any form of subsidy, whether through direct spending or tax incentives, skews the energy market and undermines the principle of free enterprise.
The most shocking thing is the battery, to me. Because the battery subsidy is at most 1-2 years of price drops. So if today, batteries are cost effective, but only because of subsidy, in a short time they will be cost-effective without any subsidy.
However, if we want cheap energy we should keep the subsidies in place. Batteries and solar get cheaper the more we build of them, so the faster we make the investment, the faster they get cheaper, and the sooner we have a cheaper energy source, which all in all saves us massive amounts of money.
The "Inflation Reduction Act" was a funny name for Biden's on-shoring of massive amounts of factories for renewable energy, but I think in the end it will stop future inflation, long after he has died. Energy price spikes are frequently the cause of inflation, but once we have the coming energy abundance, and most of the cost of electricity is in storage rather than generation, we don't have to worry as much about global geopolitics cutting off our supply. The worst will be a week-long shortage due to a continent-wide weather event that we have not yet seen the likes of, but likely will in the future due to climate change. Or, a volcano eruption that also at the same time destroys crop production, in which case lower electricity levels won't be much of a concern...
"Electrification is anti-inflationary."
> Unpacking the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act: What was in it? What could it mean for Australia?
> Clean electrification is the transformation of our energy economy away from one based on low-cost fossil-fuelled machines that require expensive future commitments to fossil-fuels, to higher-cost electric machines that are powered by clean electricity. This turns the energy economy from one of fuels to one of finance, and the beauty of finance is that it locks in the cost of something for the period of that finance. It is literally anti-inflationary as can be seen in Figure 2.
https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/612b0b172765f9c62c1c20c9/...
As far as battery capacity goes, that's also sketchy because ERCOT is allowing dangerous risky lithium packs to be installed in a tightly packed together industrial space optimized way that could result in disaster when one unit catches fire, spreading to the whole site. Better would be magnetically suspended flywheels in a hard vacuum buried under ground. These are more ecological and have the same baseband quality as a turbine constant spin generator, and require very little energy to up-keep. I would say a hybrid way of having these flywheels in large numbers with on-site lithium batteries to provide site power, and line-leveling as the relays switch over to the flywheels, similar to how batteries in a data center last just long enough to let the diesel gen spin up...
The problem is if all these renewable eco friendly sources crowd out the dirty more reliable sources, then there will eventually not be any reliable sources. It's a nasty paradox.
The incentive for new gas generation is the same as for new solar generation: selling electricity profitably on the grid. If you are saying that new gas generation has trouble competing with batteries and solar, I would agree.
I would go further and say that new solar and batteries are cheaper than merely the fuel and operating costs of many existing fossil fuel plants. Especially coal. And a lot of gas too, particularly the peaker plants that burn for short amounts of time to capture price spikes on the market.
> Very reliable inertial generators (turbines) smooth over the unstable electrical from wind turbines or solar.
There's two very different concepts here: inertial generators for frequency regulation and supplying reactive power, which solar does not generate natively, but is now with grid-forming inverters. Also, batteries have been serving frequency regulation for more than a decade, starting in the PJM market. The need for inertial generation has been replaced even with very old and expensive battery technology.
The second concept of "reliable" is dispatchable power: can you put power on the grid when it's needed? Batteries also solve this, and are being deployed, profitably, in Texas, as opposed to new gas generation.
> As far as battery capacity goes, that's also sketchy because ERCOT is allowing dangerous risky lithium packs to be installed in a tightly packed together industrial space optimized way that could result in disaster when one unit catches fire, spreading to the whole site.
That's a fairly minor implementation detail, and the installers are taking on all that risk on their own, as they will lose everything if there's a fire that spreads.
A battery going up in smoke is still far better than the amounts of natural gas that get burned in its place.
> Better would be magnetically suspended flywheels in a hard vacuum buried under ground. These are more ecological and have the same baseband quality as a turbine constant spin generator, and require very little energy to up-keep. I would say a hybrid way of having these flywheels in large numbers with on-site lithium batteries to provide site power, and line-leveling as the relays switch over to the flywheels, similar to how batteries in a data center last just long enough to let the diesel gen spin up...
Flywheels are a completely impractical technology that doesn't scale and is far too expensive. Especially in vacuum underground.
Inverters are a far better solution than fly-wheels: cheaper, more battle-tested, actually deployed in practice instead of just in the lab, and widespread.
There are good ways to do this but using small communities in another state as R&D isn’t one of them.
People are full of environmental concern for batteries (good!) but rarely question the status quo.
We don't yet know the impact of the Vistra disaster, but it's being monitored closely and we will find out. Freaking out before there is any reason to freak out is a specialty in my area. Interesting examples are WiFi sensitive people that have no problem with standing in the sun. Or the X-ray technician that is concerned about cell phone towers causing cancer.
If there are any negative effects from the fire, they will be found, but they haven't been found yet.
While the Moss Landing BESS does seem to have been one of the worst built anywhere on the planet, the recent fire there did not (a) "completely destroy the entire plant" nor (b) "dumping toxic chemicals into the local estuary".
When a modern vehicle (let alone a manufactured house) goes up in flames (which happens fairly often), it releases significantly more toxic gases than a BESS fire.
These corrections bought to you by your friendly not-in-your-neighborhood IFSAC Firefighter II.
Completely false. There have been fires at in battery storage systems. They have never, ever escaped the containment of the metal unit that comprises a given module. There is really no mechanism for a fire to spread either.
Texas is building massive amounts of natural gas, too. Solar + natural gas makes sense for America. (It doesn’t for Europe, but whatever.)
Another thing to be wary of in this title: headlines like this are written specifically to sound like renewables are winning this ideological battle against fossil fuels. It's so vital to understand: that is not happening at all. Renewables and fossil fuels capacity are BOTH increasing (though renewables at a faster rate - don't confuse the derivative with the scalar value of interest). We are not "replacing" fossil fuels by any metric, and saying so is outright greenwashing. The atmosphere responds to CO2 concentration, not good intentions.
It takes a long time for people to adapt to new reality, and I would expect natural gas to continue to be build even after it is no longer economically feasible until people learn the hard way.
Also, batteries are continuously dropping in cost. Gas might be able to reach a tiny decrease, but it does not benefit from the continual improvement of technology like batteries do.
We are not replacing fossil fuels, yet, but only becuase energy use is expanding, and the energy capacity additions are eating up our entire production capacity of renewables.
As we build out more and more factories for renewables, and as existing natural gas turbines reach end of life, the switchover will happen.
Globally, fossil fuels are barely expanding. The IEA, a famously pro-fossil fuel org, thinks that China reached peak fossil fuel consumption in 2024, and will decrease fossil fuel use in the future even as every consumption grows.
IEA also thinks that more than half of electricity generation will be carbon free, worldwide, by 2030:
https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-242-iea-outlook-2...
We are not transitioning the energy system fast enough to get the cheapest possible energy, or to meet reasonable climate goals, but that's entirely because of politics instead of technical or economic feasibility.
The media and US political parties frame our energy futures as either renewable or fossil fueled. Do I even need to explain this? Compare the official climate positions of the two major US political parties. Read the headline, it literally positions the story of renewable growth in relation to other energy sources.
The real story is that both renewables and oil and gas are growing to satisfy the ever-increasing demand for energy. We evidently need growth in both just to keep up.
> that's entirely because of politics instead of technical or economic feasibility
True. We've tried working within the system for decades, it has clearly not worked. Perhaps we should examine the status quo more critically? The earth's atmosphere doesn't give a shit about our intentions, good or bad. Just the pollution we emit. What we need desperately is a real strategy for emissions reduction based on physical evidence. Instead, we have the "green new deal" and "drill baby drill" - both of which are positions in the great US culture war, not evidence-based strategies for the energy market.
Thankfully there are rational scientist and engineers working on our energy system - they don't have the luxury of picking sides in a culture war. They use the best of renewables and gas to build resilience into the system while gradually increasing renewables year over year. There is no ideological choice to be made - so long as we demand energy, we need growth in renewables and oil. Acknowledging that fact is politically toxic to both the left and the right.
The future of resilience is batteries, not gas. Most of these new gas generators will be stranded assets within a decade.
Additionally the part of the picture missing in this announcement is retirements, which are of course all fossil fuel.
The green new deal envisions us driving around in EVs.
The drill baby drill folks picture us driving around in our pickups.
And the reality (if we want any hope of meeting our climate goals) is probably no more driving, or at least significantly less. We saw what covid lockdown did to our supply chains. Do we really think we could handle a drastic reduction in mobility and economic demand? I don't see that happening anywhere today, do you? I see us getting less resilient to oil decline by the year. You can no longer live a normal life in most American towns without a car. Want to eat and send your kids to school? You drive. We're not prepared to have a conversation about consuming less, let alone actually achieving it IRL.
That’s impressive. And fairly green-friendly for a state that gets a bad rap for being in bed with oil/gas
You can already see this conflict in all the areas where the new factories have been built from Biden's IRA. These factories generally raise wages quite a bit, invigorate communities that feel like they have been forgotten, but that it's clean energy doing the good is kept on the down-low. To mix metaphors: don't poke the bear, lest the bear cuts off its nose to spite its face.
But today it is not "politically incorrect" to advocate for changes to the environmental regulations for California Democrats. And they are definitely pursuing changes to regulations!
So you are very correct that regulations are in the way, and that Democrats are in power, but you are wrong that it's politically incorrect to change the regulations.
In California politics, only Republicans pass things. Democrats always pursue and advocate.
Notably, by today's political standards, (gubernatorial-era) Reagan and Wilson would be characterized as moderate Democrats.
I would argue that it makes little more sense for a nation state to take on that economic risk, either. Risk can be priced, and the bill for many the risks of nuclear are already picked up by others due to the laws around nuclear. If, even with those massive subsidies, nuclear is too economically risky for utilities, I would argue that it's too costly overall for anyone. Or at least a poor decision.
Until there's some major innovation in nuclear construction, the risk should be reserved for those with no better options (e.g. Finland, maybe the UK, etc.)
I've yet to see anything solid in this latest talk of nuclear renaissance (which they talk about every year) that can't be put down to silicon valley nerds moving in weird political circles that are irrationally attracted to nuclear power.
Then you realise it costs multiple times more than renewables and batteries (ain't that the real revolution), takes over a decade to build and imposes large obligations on the owners.
Moving the solar supply chain to be domestic is a massive undertaking. First Solar, one of the stronger US companies, will be at at 50/50 manufacturing in the US versus not:
"We inaugurated our new $1.1 billion Alabama facility, which when, fully scaled, adds 3.5 gigawatts of vertically integrated nameplate solar manufacturing capacity. The start of commercial operation at the Alabama facility, along with our under construction Louisiana facility, which remains on track to begin operations in the second half of 2025, keeps us on course to achieve our projection of over 14 gigawatts of annual U.S. nameplate capacity and over 25 gigawatts of global nameplate capacity by 2026." https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2024/10/29/fi...
You are correct that it will take investment to continue to build factories here instead of Malaysia or India, but the factories will be built regardless.
The technology for a 100% renewable energy system for all of humanity is about 90%-95% there, the biggest impediment is political and not technical now. (Hard-to-decarbonize areas like industry is close but not there yet, and we can do all the other areas while new solutions are found for cement, chemicals, etc.)
As the solar and storage costs continue to plummet even if you can’t sell electricity to the grid we will increasingly see more and more homes with near zero electricity usage for much of the year.
No matter how much you attempt to force fossil fuels down these people throats there’s nothing you can do if people simply don’t pull energy from the grid. Then the expensive facilities sit unused.
Offloading these costs on the voters will quickly become politically untenable.
To block solar, some states are putting high fees on base connections, and low per kWh costs. If the grid-connection fees subsidize the per-kWh generation fees, it breaks the economics of lowering your consumption from the grid with your own generation.
Edit: I want one so bad, something cool about being a farmer but farming photons instead of plants and animals.
Especially for grazing, raised photovoltaic allows the photons to be harvested along with allowing goats or cows to graze the landscape.
Crops can also be grown in between rows of solar.
This arrangement also mitigates the often destructive effect that large utility scale solar has on the landscape.
The landscape degradation is why having generation, and transmission, be as locally contained as possible is the best technical solution. But utilities often fight this, since they make money on large utility scale project, and loose money on building and neighborhood scale generation and distribution.
As always, the middle way is the best. Too bad nuance is not longer an allowed perspective...
1) most years (with notable exceptions), peak electricity happens when the sun is shining 2) west Texas is very windy
One of the reasons that TX was caught flat-footed a few years ago in a cold snap, was that in a decade we went from oil-and-coal power generation to mostly natgas (which froze up), wind (which froze up, albeit not as much as the natgas), and solar (not working at night). It was the first very hard freeze under the new power mix. Not so long ago TX was talking about "clean coal"; now it is natgas, wind, and solar.
Just a note about how much wind froze up in Texas: wind outperformed projected supply for the cold snap.
[1] https://idc-online.com/technical_references/pdfs/electronic_...
There's no magic source of power that is immune from needing to prepare for exceptional weather conditions.
By separating what you pay for transmission (monopoly) from generation (free market), it created a persistent demand for more/better/cheaper supply.
It is a much more flexible structure that allows municipalities to do cool stuff like this: https://www.cambridgema.gov/CDD/News/detail.aspx?path=/sitec...
Texas will have great energy infrastructure because they let developers build it.
I consider myself someone with "liberal values", but I don't understand why so many liberals like to pretend that the reality of economic incentives don't exist. Sure, it would be nice if we could all sing kumbaya together and build things, but the real world largely doesn't work that way. And it's not just "big developers" - most people would choose the more polluting energy source if it saved them 5 cents.
Other similar situation: so many people in "liberal cities" like to rail against "big evil developers" when it comes to housing, and as a result they have a giant housing shortage that is responsible for tons of social ills. In Austin we've built a shit ton of housing, especially rental, by letting developers build, and surprise surprise housing and rental costs in Austin have fallen a ton since their (admittedly ridiculous) peak.
The Griddy incident wasn't quite "price gouging" if you want to read about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griddy_(company)#2021_Texas_po...
> Griddy advised customers to remove themselves from their system during the storm, and says that over 9,700 accounts did by February 15. On February 17, they asked for PUC approval to switch the remaining customers to a traditional energy provider, but the PUC, which was overwhelmed by the situation, was unable to discuss the matter.
Outages do cause deaths, that is for sure. PG&E has killed a lot of people by that metric and unfortunately PG&E's problems are a little harder to fix.
For example, during the 2021 winter storm and outage, a huge problem was that no power producers had any incentive to weatherize their systems, resulting in a huge chunk of them all going offline at the same time. It seems more than reasonable to require producers to have some minimal level of weatherization, and to provide incentives to producers that have better weatherization.
This is kinda my point - I'm not arguing for a totally deregulated free-for-all, as the unregulated free market is notoriously bad at dealing with "black swan" events. But that doesn't mean that sensible regulations can't be put in place that still use economic incentives to achieve their goals.
Regulation on a minimal level of weatherization is not an economic incentive.
I.e., if you want to participate in the electricity producer market in TX, you need to have X level of weatherization. Call that regulation, fine, but essentially every private, non-governmental-run market has a set of rules that all participants need to adhere to in order to participate in the market, and the penalty for non-compliance is getting kicked out of the market. That's basically what I'm arguing for here.
Texas has actually done a lot better at producing supposedly "liberal outcomes" by acknowledging the reality of economic incentives. We've built a ton of renewables. We've also built a ton of housing that have shown the stark contrast to the idiotic housing policies of California. I'll also give a shout-out to the "Sunset Commission" of the TX legislature, which reviews government/regulatory bodies every 12 years to ensure they're still fulfilling their original mission.
At the same time, we have idiotic laws that force women to leave the state to get healthcare that will save their lives. Our educational financing system is a disaster.
Point being I don't consider myself a "centrist", I just want to choose policies that actually work, regardless of tribalism.
Additionally every time I hear someone claim that companies running everything will be more efficient, when I dive into their beliefs I find out that they expect organizations they call “governments” are required to do many tasks that would not be required of organizations they call “corporations” and that is where all the “efficiency” comes from.
If this was supposedly so much more of an “efficiently system then why has Texas experienced years of outage causing problems in their electrical grid?
I'm not saying the government can't be efficient, but taxes represent a cash flow that is close to completely unbound to the results of their spending, so it's much easier for them to be used poorly depending on who's in charge.
Part of the point I’m trying to drive to is that many of the problems people have with governments are actually problems with organizations operating at scale
(And obviously that can be largely fixed with a carbon tax, but good luck getting that to happen.)
I would say I am progressive politically but the ostensibly progressive mindset that led to denying that housing supply could help with the cost of housing has been crazy harmful. Even with the newfound acknowledgement that housing production is necessary, it's going to be harder and more expensive to catch up - peakier demand for trades labor and materials also drives up prices!!
Another key point, look up net migration in Austin. During the pandemic and remote work, everyone and their brother wanted to move to Austin, it was super trendy and a lot of tech was moving there. Look it up now. In Q4 2023 not only did grow to slow but it reversed to net outflow. Thats a massive difference in demand for housing and a massive difference in supply of housing. [1]
Yes, more homes got built, but there were many other factors at play than something simple like “let them build houses”.
1. https://www.redfin.com/news/housing-migration-trends-q3-2023...
True but also doesn't explain the Austin housing market. Austin added more new apartments just east of downtown in 5 years than San Francisco built in the entire 1990s. The differences between pro-housing and deeply anti-housing local attitudes do not come down to geography.
Either way it seems like housing prices started to decline spring 2022, about 1 year after the massive spike in building permits started in earnest.
There are a lot of impediments to doing the same thing in say, the Northeast, where I am. Labor is insanely expensive. This land has been occupied by city for hundreds of years, and greenfield does not exist nearby, nor is there the appetite to Ctrl C Ctrl V build massive subdivisions, especially out of reach of transit here.
Austin proves a relationship between supply and housing prices, but it will always be incumbent upon cities and states to pave the way for massive construction of housing in times of need. I think that long term, that means working to develop the labor pool and participation in the trades, streamlining permitting and inspection (I just finished a gut reno and this was a fucking nightmare), and yes, changing zoning so the mass housing projects actually can get built.
Actually maybe I should build something - like a ratings site.
Texas has no income tax which is why they have high property taxes.
With property taxes you don't have that coupling between changes in income and changes in the tax. That can make a property tax way more painful.
That's exactly what should happen in a productive economy: big cash payments to give up underutilized land to somebody who can make better use of it.
People talk about taxing granny out of her house, but they conveniently forget to mention that granny is keeping half a dozen people homeless by hoarding an underutilized property.
That’s a distasteful and predatory way to speak of someone who rightfully bought her property, possibly a widow, and just wants to live in peace versus having someone (business or gov) try to break the rules to take her property.
It's far more distasteful to ignore the needs of everyone to give a very minor convenience to somebody with a lot of wealth.
Winston Churchill on this sort of old and wrong political argument about widows:
https://savingcommunities.org/docs/churchill.winston/budgetr...
Where are you getting that from?
In most cases when granny sells her house and moves due to high taxes the buyer will be a single family that will live in the house. In the vast majority of cases that family will have less than half a dozen people, and in the vast majority of cases they will not have been homeless before.
In a place like New York, Massachusetts, or California, you have alot of intellectual property driving the economy, so you need to tax income. New York's discretionary budget is essentially derived from income taxes on a few thousand people. New York/Mass vs. California shows why each thing is important -- NY and Mass are leaders for K-12, California is ranked like 35-40 among states.
Local control of property taxes mean that the former can fund education effectively, which they do outside of the hood. California schools are stuck with trying to extract dollars from the state legislature, as the boomers effectively pay no property tax.
CA, NY, and MA all have terrible problems with housing and land use in general, largely caused by poor allocation of land due to extremely poor taxation.
Land in Manhattan, Cambridge, the Bay Area, and Los Angeles is some of the most productive land in the world, but the extraction happens because of the network effects of bundling people together.
By taxing the land rents, poor uses could be replaced by far better ones, increasing the land value and economic output even further.
Property tax isn't quite as good as a land value tax, but it's at least getting towards taxing the right thing.
This was another California Republican idea, namely Reagan's, and I think he implemented it nationally when he was president too.
This means that in boom cycles with lots of IPOs and acquisitions, the California state coffers are bulging with money, but in a broad economic downturn there are a few news cycles of "California has a $XYZ billion state budget deficit" before the new budget is set since that deficit is how the new budget is set (no news articles on the balancing, though). There's a big appetite for anti-California news and I have little patience for the assholes who gobble up that misinformation...
Most people radically overestimate California income taxes because of propaganda by the narrow group of people paying top marginal rates directed at the broad group of people who pay closer to the median rate, because the former group wants the latter group to act against its own interests.
California did that for a few years. Auctions every half hour, everyone pays the spot price. It was too exploitable by energy traders and resulted in blackouts. Also, PG&E went bankrupt, after a century as a regulated utility. The current system trades energy mostly on a day-ahead basis, which is more stable.
Ask Houston about letting developers build with little oversight. Or, ask the home owners that bought some of that property.
Ask homeowners that live on wells that have become polluted because of Texas being in bed with oil and the little oversight applied. The rap is well deserved not unfortunate.
Land use isn't nearly as free-wheeling as people both here and elsewhere like to pretend. There's loads of restrictions, both good and bad, and permitting is not quite the nightmare as it is in (from what I hear) New York City, but it's still no walk in the park if you are trying to do anything unusual.
Entire countries [1]. (Hell, our nation's capital.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands
If your house flooded in Allison, Harvey, or the Tax Day floods, I am sorry that you went through that, but I am curious: when was it built?
One technical issue with the article, and I see this a lot, is the unit of measure used to describe the storage capacity.
> Texas added nearly 1,500 megawatts of battery storage
In the addled, quasi-imperial units of the US, shouldn't this be megawatt*hours?
I once asked an english person about BTUs, they had no idea what I was talking about. Even though that is an allegedly British Thermal Unit.
Of course, in rational units this would be something like gigajoules:
1.0 Megawatt-hours (MWh) = 3.60 Gigajoules (GJ)
1. How much power output the storage can replace (i.e. discharge capacity) . The appropriate unit for that is watts (or megawatts, etc.)
2. How long can it do it for (i.e storage capacity) - as you point out, the appropriate metric for that is megawatt-hours.
Edit: 1-2 hours of storage seem to be the current state in Texas at the moment: https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/energy-storage/texas-co...
No, that's actually megawatts. Grid assets are measured primarily by power, because the grid is operated on dispatch of power.
For storage, the storage capacity doesn't matter from the grid side. Grid operators have an ever-changing mix of resources that bid into the market, and select the winning bids, based on their bid price and power amount, for fixed duration dispatch. When the battery operator is out of power, they drop out of bidding.
If for some reason the energy content is your only concern, and an article doesn't mention the energy capacity, multiple the power quantity by 4 hours. That is the median amount of duration at full power for batteries, due to cost-optimal design. The very first few installations on the grid may be smaller, as in only 1-2 hours, because there's a fair amount of power demand at the beginning for frequency regulation, which requires very short duration. But as more gets deployed, frequency regulation is no longer needed, and 4 hours tends to dominate. I've seen a few 6 hour duration installations too, which may make sense depending on the specific local market needs.
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