Almost three years since the deadly Texas blackout of 2021, a panel of judges from the First Court of Appeals in Houston has ruled that big power companies cannot be held liable for failure to provide electricity during the crisis. The reason is Texas’ deregulated energy market.
The decision seems likely to protect the companies from lawsuits filed against them after the blackout. It leaves the families of those who died unsure where next to seek justice.
In February of 2021, a massive cold front descended on Texas, bringing days of ice and snow. The weather increased energy demand and reduced supply by freezing up power generators and the state’s natural gas supply chain. This led to a blackout that left millions of Texans without energy for nearly a week.
The state has said almost 250 people died because of the winter storm and blackout, but some analysts call that a serious undercount.
It is almost like natural monopolies, such as primary power generation and supply, should be under the control of the Government and not private individuals.
They all used to be. Then Reagan and Clinton happened.
ding ding ding. We have a winner! Give that man a prize!
Thank you, thank you.
My prize will sit proudly in my woman cave.
Sorry but lemmy has declared you a male. Your penis will arrive in 3 to 5 business days.
I have a battery-operated one that gives me no drama or grief.
Hopefully that penis is returnable.
Best I can do is store credit.
If she really cared about her battery-operated penis, she’d use the store credit to buy it a fleshlight.
Woman caave… go on
Down, boy.
Well it’s probably got a tv, comfy place to sit, and video games
Please note; man was intended as species as in “give that dog a prize” I’m just a dead cat.
All good. :)
Most places that are not Texas still have something resembling the old school utility model where the state effectively grants a license to a private company to operate and manage the grid, which is itself a public right of way. This is governed by a state appointed utility board.
And in RI, when everyone objects loudly, they nod their heads, and then do it anyway.
Can you point me to where I might learn more about this?
This is pretty good article about how and why.
Yep. Essential services should not be for profit.
For profit isn’t inherently a bad thing, but the more essential the service should warrant more and more regulations on safety security and pricing. They should not be given unlimited control over these.
Government agencies are more than capable of providing equally shitty service even without a profit motive, see: DMV. Any monopoly is. This is partially why regarding universal healthcare most people aren’t advocating for government owned healthcare facilities, but the government being the single payer to privately run facilities to control prices.
While government monopolies can absolutely create shitty services, the main difference between a government service and privately-controlled service is that the government (and hence, the people, in a democracy) has the power to direct the service on how to operate. The government can’t just shut down a private power supplier because their customer service is trash, and the individual consumer has no power as to how the service operates.
I assume the DMV being shitty is just a meme, like Taco Bell giving you diarrhea.
cause i’ve been in many DMVs, in several states, and never had a headache with it, and no one I know personally has had a problem either. Small sample base, of course.
No no… Checks the GOP playbook: we just need to offer a premium power support plan so if the power goes out they’ll provide you a backup generator. It just costs twice the normal rate.
I know your joking here, but this is actually the path forward and is being implemented in other states and countries.
The power company provides at a discount or for free a home backup battery to the residence. If not free, You pay off the battery at a very affordable rate but end up with a smaller power bill as the power company can access its power to balance the load, filling it up when power is cheap and the battery being used when power is expensive.
In a blackout, the home owner gets to use the battery and doesn’t suffer an outage.
It makes the grid more secure by dispersing it around thousands of homes instead of a large expensive failure points and gives them an improved ability to balance the overall load instead of needing a gas peaker plant.
I think it was recently announced that a Vermont power company was going to onboard 100% of their users in the next few years, but it’s happening elsewhere too. If a tree takes something down in a snow storm, people won’t lose power giving them time to fix it.
That actually seems like a really good idea on the infrastructure side. We should still get rid of private power companies.
Absolutely.
Batteries are consumable though. Only so much usage available
An LFP battery will last over a decade of daily full discharges, and that’s not going to be what happens, and even then, it’s still 80%.
Probably looking at
30-4020-30 years before wanting to replace it due to energy levels.Peaker plants also require maintenance and staffing and other costs associated with them.
The batteries being consumable isn’t a problem.
Edit: and gas from a peaker plant is consumed too
That’s communism and we are a capitalist country.
The right thing to do under a capitalist economy is to buy the government and give yourself a monopoly.
This isn’t a natural monopoly, it’s protected by legislature and cronyism.
A proper capitalist approach to utilities, then the pipes and wires need to be considered no different then the road they are installed on. Recoup money by selling metered wholesale access to the carriers and utilities.
But we don’t have proper capitalism. We have this bastardized American version that sucks.
We settled it before the damn constitution even started. How these nitwits in DC don’t see how publicly run infrastructure doesn’t provide for the common defense or promote general welfare is beyond me. But I guess running water, heat, affordable healthcare, and an ability to communicate with each other and the rest of the world doesn’t count under that, somehow.
Maybe if the courts took the founders intent from the Prologue instead of the secret letters to their mistresses, we’d have a functional system. But that’s just my opinion.
A government providing services is not communism, it’s a first-world standard.
I thought the sarcasm of my first two paragraphs was heavily laid on, but I suppose not.
I don’t disagree with you, however the majority of electoral college and senate voters agree with my first two paragraphs.
We are insistent that we must do things differently. This American Exceptionalism, as if there’s something fundamentally different between humans born inside its walls than the ones born out.
If we must be insistent that we’re different, we should at least be consistent in its application. The preamble basically implies that the ideal is exactly what you and the rest of my post is saying.
In the modern world a countries greatest strength is its ability to utilize its economies of scale. If for no other reason we should at least realize that the existing systems are unsustainably wasteful.
I’m sorry. I had someone argue something very similar to me. And since it was someone I knew IRL, I knew they were 100% serious…
You mean the dudes who owned slaves and thought that only white men were people? Ok yeah, they were righteous …
Many of them were either abolitionists or manumissionists. It’s hard to believe we had always been so conflicted since our founding (as many of the northern states had already abolished slavery before ratifying the constitution), yet still managed to have a reasonably functional government essentially made up entirely of rich white dudes who openly hated each others guts.
Also it’s easy to sit here and poo-poo the whole slavery thing now, 300 something years later. Washington got his first slaves from inheritance. When he was 11. That’s not me dismissing it, that’s just me demonstrating how normalized it was.
The issue here is specifically that they’re not monopolies any more, because of deregulation
Ironically, if they were a monopoly, they would have an obligation to provide power in emergencies, per the ruling.
So this is more like the spiderman pointing at spiderman thing.
Except instead of Spiderman it’s the Monopoly Man.
I believe cartel would be a better name for it in this case. ERCOT is a cartel.
Why did it take me so long to finally realize that by privatizing services like these, governments are preemptively shifting the blame when the service fails? Voters who are angry at the energy company won’t be (as) angry with the politicians.
What are yah, some sorta communist? /s He’s sayin private companies shouldnt be fuckin us over, get him! /s
Production can be liberalised, but it requires good regulation. Regulation failed to include a rule for responsibility to provided a minimum of energy, the judge can’t do more than the regulation law. It works in EU, we didn’t have blackout past year even though the situation was dramatic mostly due to the Russian invasion, because the liberalised market allowed efficient sharing of energy where it was most needed.
I wouldn’t be so certain a public monopoly could have managed it in such an efficient way (in terms of finance, energy usage and service). People tend to idealize public administration.