As a Texas resident, I’m glad that batteries and renewables are bailing us out.
Once a week or so, my utility (actually, a middleman wholesaler of power that they purchase from the actual generators, due to our deregulated electrical market structure) sends an email asking us to please limit consumption during the following day due to anticipated extraordinary demand.
My response is “get bent” - ERCOT has literally one job - grid stability - and the legislature had no business trying to attract crypto miners. So I’ll happily take advantage of the fixed priced electrical contract I entered into (nine cents a kilowatt hour) and keep my AC where I damn well please.
99% of time, it is literally my pleasure to act in pro-social ways according to the greater good, but I see no reason whatsoever why I personally should bail out the grid and state leadership from their political decisions.
I’ve spent plenty of time sitting in the cold or hot dark due to their mismanagement (probably an aggregate of about 10 days without power in the last three years), so when (if?) they’re capable of attending to the population as a whole rather than special interests, I’ll happy do my part. Until then, I’m simply going to continue to abide by the “every man for himself” ethos they’ve adopted.
I live in Texas and got a “smart” thermostat recently. I was delighted to find that my energy company is offering a $25/year credit for having one. It’s not much, but it’s nice to have.
…or so I thought. It turns out that accepting this $25/yr alllows the grid to remotely control my thermostat.
I was sweating in my living room, wondering why it felt so hot. Apparently the grid was facing peak load, so they raised my thermostat temperature by 2 degrees!
Thankfully there is a manual override when this happens, but I have to call my energy company to disable this “feature” completely.
I’m sorry, you cannot pay me $25/yr to sweat on my sofa.
I live in a northern, Midwestern state and our coop (part of MISO) offered a one time $1500 and continued discounts (11%) per month on electricity for the capability to control utility curtailment (power control to the unit, no ability to adjust set-point or collect any other data). For winter it can only be in buildings that are non-primary living and can only shut off power to an electrical heating appliance (heat pump, boiler, etc). In the summer they can curtail your heat pump / AC for up to 15 minutes at a time.
I see the curtailment notification on my thermostat on hot days. But the house never gets warm. I have a newer heat pump that is rated up to 22 SEER2 and compared to my old on/off AC unit the variable speed unit makes a huge difference in performance, cost and noise levels. I never hear it running when it is and so during curtailment I don't notice it unless I see the notification.
Is it really only 15 minutes at a time, or is it 15 minute units with possibly multiple in a row? Heat pump efficiency requires long cycles, so turning it off, on, off, on within the course of an hour to make some "never off more than 15 minutes" guarantee would be counterproductive.
The unit basically runs all day during the day on hot days. The difference is, as you state, it runs long cycles. The 15 minutes it's off is the break in the cycle itself. The unit I have is a communicating unit that "learns" the house in terms of all the internal and external changes. So it knows what fan speed and compressor rate to run to get to the setpoint - it doesn't just ramp up to the highest rate after a curtailment event. So it's basically running at a very low rate all day long, curtailment happens, and it ramps slightly if there's a need to bring any zones back to setpoint - but the thermostat is aware of the curtailment event and, as I was told, responds different after the curtailment is lifted. I talked to both the installer and the manufacturer regarding whether or not curtailment would negatively impact the system (performance, cost, longevity) and the consensus was that unless the curtailment events happened every hour there wasn't any downside to cooling. Heating would be another story, but I don't have any curtailment contract for heating in my home.
And I believe the contract states curtailment events can only happen up to 4 times in a given day and cannot happen more than once an hour.
Ah, so basically the variable speed and feed-forward PID make it so the unit is running all the time, so it's not like the 15 minute curtailment will come right after it kicked on to satisfy cooling demand. Rather your house is continually cooling, stops for 15 minutes, then goes back to it. That makes a lot of sense!
I do find it interesting that these terms are still valuable to a power company. Obviously being able to shed the load for 15 minutes is fantastic, but I would think the system would then just use more energy (say for the next 45 minutes) to make up for it. But perhaps staggering the curtailment times, and paying the debt of more draw from the units that were curtailed by doing even more curtailments, can kick the can down the road enough for the few hours they need to smooth peak load?
Also just a guess: is the story with heating that your heat pump is sized based on your max heating load, and so losing up to 25% of its capacity on the coldest days means it would never be able to catch up?
> Also just a guess: is the story with heating that your heat pump is sized based on your max heating load, and so losing up to 25% of its capacity on the coldest days means it would never be able to catch up?
The unit I have has a HSPF2 rating of 10.5. It's very efficient at the transfer of the heat available. Heat pumps can extract more energy than the consume. New heat pumps can operate over 300% efficiency. The best furnaces are generally in the mid-90 percentages.
I have a dual-fuel system and can set where the heat pump locks out. The system is rated to a COP of 1.75 at 5F. Meaning it's still over 100% efficient at that temperature. The unit will operate down to -22F but would be at, likely, less than 50% capacity of output. To save on wear and tear of the unit, however I have my setpoint lockout at 15.
It would have to be significantly below 0 for days on end to have a problem. But even then the furnace would be providing primary heat. There are people in my area that heat their entire home with ductless heat pumps [0]. My unit is rated at 48k BTU. The furnace at 100k BTU. I only really "need" the furnace for emergency. But we do have sub-zero highs rather often and during those days the heat pump would be running continuously.
I also have an 80 gallon hybrid heat pump water heater which has saved us thousands over the last few years. 98% of the year it only uses the heat pump.
It seems you took my comment as an attack on heat pumps, which I certainly didn't intend! Such is life in our needlessly polarized information environment. Thank you for the description of your system though! I've got thoughts of a heat pump in my future, and I will be well involved in the design if I don't outright DIY, so it's nice to hear about other people's setups.
By "lose 25% of its capacity", I mean because with curtailment it could be off up to 25% of the time (assuming the same curtailment schedule as summer). The focus on "coldest days" is because that is when your house needs the most heat (regardless of source type). Based on the climate, I assume your heat pump was sized based on the minimum it needs to supply for heating loads on the "design day" (coldest day generally expected for your climate), meaning on the coldest days it requires most of its capacity to keep the house temperature steady. Whereas it's oversized for summer so it can still keep up even if it loses a bunch of capacity due to curtailment.
I'm a bit surprised with a solid backup heat source that winter curtailment isn't more attractive to you (it would also help exercise your backup heat). Does it really not make financial sense? Or is it more of an idealistic thing of not wanting to burn oil/gas as much as possible?
>I have a newer heat pump that is rated up to 22 SEER2
Can I ask why you got a heat pump with such a high SEER rating? I look at flyers advertising heat pumps near me and the price differential between 16 SEER and 18/20 SEER units just doesn't seem worth it at all even accounting energy savings.
Because it was a wash. I was paid a higher rebate from the state, the coop we have for power and the manufacturer. It didn't make financial sense to buy anything less.
Your manufacturer gave you a rebate on top of the state and coop rebate? So you have $1500 from the coop, what kind of rebates did you get from the state and manufacturer?
Yes. The manufacturer (Carrier) has a program called "Cool Cash" - the linked PDF is an example. The "Cool Cash" program I had was different [0]. The state also had passed a new energy law that provided rebates [1]. It's been so popular that they're expanding that even further in 2023 for air source heat pumps with, potentially, more money. [2]
> I’m sorry, you cannot pay me $25/yr to sweat on my sofa.
I mean, if the grid goes down because everyone refuses to sweat a tiny bit during a massive heat wave's peak load, you might be sweating anyways... for longer and $25 poorer.
The ability of the grid companies to rely on the fact that they can lower people’s electric usage centrally might prevent them from appropriately scaling up the system.
If they can smooth out peaks - if, say, a bunch of people set their thermostats to cool at 2pm so they spread that out over a 10-15 minute period, or they have some folks run AC at 2-3 and others 3-4 - they might need to also run a lot less wasteful energy production.
As with most things, there are good and bad ways to use this ability.
I would prefer if the two entities are separated though. The thermostat should come from a private company that optimizes for the weather locally and possibly takes in data from the electric company through an API so the end user has more control and the motivations for both entities stay intact.
I’d argue the cost of scaling up the grid, both economic and environmental, are too great when the problem can be resolved by raising everyone’s thermostat to 76 for a couple hours a year. Peaker plants are wildly expensive to keep in service, and usually run off of coal or oil.
And not just whether it goes down but it can save money. During summer peaks the cost of electricity to the utility on the open market can spike 10x or more. Almost all utilities have regulated profit which allows them to recover (most) costs, so shaving those peaks ultimately saves ratepayers.
I have ecobee thermostats that I’m generally happy with - HomeKit integration, seemingly comprehensive privacy controls, overall well designed and functional - but they have all kinds of dark patterns designed to force you into these programs. And you really have to go in to a bunch of different settings to excise the utility’s ability to take over your thermostat if you’ve happened to opt in.
I think demand reduction is generally a great idea, but considering what that two degree increase is saving your utility, there really ought to be a 50/50 split of savings than kicking back a pittance of $25 a year.
It would be interesting (better?) if it was a market in which homes with these thermostats could set prices at which they are willing to reduce energy use.
Actually, 99% agree. In Texas, up until one of our recent power debacles, there was a retail energy provider whose schtick was passing through spot rates to retail customers. Normally this was a small fraction (30%) of typical retail pricing. Until the grid went under stress, spot prices skyrocketed, and retail customers who opted into that limited-upside potentially-unlimited-downside plan were paying something like 10,000% of typical pricing. To quote a former Texas governor who forgot which cabinet agencies he wanted to eliminate, “Oops.”
I’m not sure how something like that could happen with what you suggest, but I’m a little wary of unanticipated consequences so as to degrade my degree of confidence slightly given recent events.
I believe you’re enrolled in Smart Savers in addition to having the thermostat. They might’ve rushed you by the agreement. It’s not supposed to be an opt-out program.
In Illinois, Exelon has a similar program. In exchange for $40/year, they install a control on your AC that lets them cycle it off during summer months for a period of time each day. Connecting the program to a smart meter would let them make finer adjustments, and probably more frequently.
We stay enrolled in the $40/year program because if they’re cycling us, it’s unnoticeable. I’m not sure how much discomfort we’d tolerate.
> so they raised my thermostat temperature by 2 degrees!
I’m sorry, but you get much less sympathy from me for this generic comment. Raising your temp from 68 to 70 means nothing. Changing your temp from 78 to 80 is totally different. I’m also supposed to feel sorry for you because you didn’t read the fine print? Sure, maybe I’m victim blaming, but come on
1. That (but never really set it up due to the number of people going in and out, but nice to turn things back when we’re all away for an extended period and turn it back on before we return)
2. Run the fans for a little bit every hour (i wish it could be smarter within which part of the hour it could run tho)
3. Disable the AC entirely when it’s cool outside (but had to use some unintended setting designed to prevent « heat pump » stress). Though lead to some head banging by family members asking why the ac isn’t running (answer: open some windows).
4. Tried and failed to get it set up to properly account for humidity when it comes to AC (25C and dry is nice, 25C and humid can feel too hot)
5. Set up too much programming to properly pre charge for in anticipation of time of day price increases and step back when it’s going to go down soon. IMO, this should have been out-of-the-box functionality, not require the complex scheduling i had to do. Even though we have gas heat, I still have some programming for this because its electric load is still like 1kw.
I did immediately turn off the « community electricity savings » thing. You gotta pay me for that!
I didn't install the smart thermostat my power company sent me. I don't run the AC lower than 80° and the heater higher than 65°. I'm already doing my part.
> actually, a middleman wholesaler of power that they purchase from the actual generators, due to our deregulated electrical market structure
Every state and most (all?) of the EU uses the same "deregulated electrical market structure" that separates electrical utilities from power generators.
What he's talking about is a situation where the consumer can choose who to buy their electricity from.
In most of the US electricity is a lot like cable TV: the company that owns the cable is the company that you buy your cable TV from.
In around 15 states there are districts where it works like the wired phone system worked after local loop unbundling: you paid the company that owned the wire for access to the wire, and independently paid a phone company for telephone service over the wire and/or an ISP for DSL service over the wire.
> Yes. Fundamentally, the difference between the Texas market and other energy markets across the U.S. is that it’s an electricity-only market. There is no capacity market paying generators to ensure there will be enough power to meet peak demand. The generators only make money when they’re delivering electrons into the grid.
> He said he had nearly emptied his savings account so that he would be able to pay the $16,752 electric bill charged to his credit card — 70 times what he usually pays for all of his utilities combined. “There’s nothing I can do about it, but it’s broken me.”
An electricity-only market isn’t unusual. France, Spain, Italy, and the UK created capacity markets only recently (in 2017, 2021, 2018, and 2014, respectively). Germany specifically decided against creating one: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22146....
OP is imputing some ideological aspect to ERCOT’s design, but electricity-only markets versus an electricity-plus-capacity markets is a technical detail of how the market is structured. Both are “deregulated electrical market structures” that separate electric utilities from generators—which is the specific feature OP was complaining about.
In fact, capacity markets are typically seen as subsidies for fossil fuels. The whole point is to take money from ratepayers and give it to generators who can commit to producing a definite capacity. That process favors gas plants; renewables capacity is heavily discounted in capacity auctions.
I’m mostly imputing ideological motives to what ERCOT’s become and how that’s led them to fail at operating a robust, reliable grid, and highlighting some of the perverse incentives specific to Texas’s electrical market. I’m also complaining about our legislature’s resistance to, and efforts to actively stymie, the incredible bounty of renewable energy resources this state possesses. Fortunately the profit potential is strong enough that the invisible hand is continuing to do its job, but my god, this state is the Saudi Arabia of wind and to a lesser degree solar. As well as being a Saudi Arabia of, well, oil and gas! Why not embrace all of the above??
I personally enjoy the Western standard of living, and that, today and for the foreseeable future, is absolutely predicated on fossil fuels being a substantial part of the energy mix. I also try not to be a hypocrite so I actually consider myself pro-fossil fuel when used efficiently and appropriately. As such, I favor just about all types of electrical generation, except for coal and oil fired plants (and possibly biomass - I don’t know the technical details well enough, but my vague understanding is that’s basically regulatory arbitrage that does more harm than good). At least fortunately oil-fired plants are vanishingly rare these days.
Natural gas generators absolutely should get capacity payments as firm generation that can be called on rapidly (newest combined cycle turbines can ramp within 15-30 minutes), but so should batteries and battery firmed renewables.
If you can generate when called upon, you should get paid to be there when sufficient capacity is questionable. If you cannot, your generation should trade at a discount to reflect its intermittent nature.
According to a report by the Energy Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s electric grid manager, crypto mining “consumed” more than 3,300 Gigawatt/hours of Texas grid energy in 2022, more than double the amount used 2021.
Riot Platforms’ mine in Rockdale, Texas, uses about the same amount of electricity as the nearest 300,000 homes, making it the most power-intensive Bitcoin mining operation in America.[1]
At least we can take comfort in the fact that this computing power was used to support a platform popular with speculators, money launders, drug traders and ransom ware exploiters.
I have a buddy who lives in rural south Texas who saw a couple containers with big fans on the side get dropped off near his town, connect power and set up some sort of liquid cooling lines to a pool. He assumed it was crypto mining, which was the only thing that made much sense to me as well. Interesting to see his on the ground observations as part of the larger story.
That article is full of misinformation and has been debunked multiple times. Even the hero image is doctored to make it look smoggy and polluted. [0]
Bitcoin mining is great for the Texas grid. Miners end up buying cheap excess energy and when there is a shortage they just turn off their miners, keeping the price from going haywire.
Just as Natural Gas and Coal are "saving" Texas when it's not sunny and windy. A robust power grid can benefit from a diversity of sources and that's exactly what ERCOT has been doing - investing in engineering to make a better utility, not some moral battle between renewables and fossil fuels.
How well did natural gas do when it was unseasonably cold and the wellheads froze over?
I don’t see a single person in this thread commenting in good faith who’s not in favor of a robust energy mix. But you’re deluding yourself if you think that the political body that is ERCOT is acting solely (or even primarily) toward the establishment of a robust grid based on apolitical engineering and a variety of predictably reliable sources of energy without regard to how that power is generated.
ERCOT is definitely concerned with how the power is generated, I made no claim to the contrary. They just don't have the luxury of seeing it as a mutually exclusive choice based on morals.
Sure, there's a political bias towards phasing out fossil fuels. Most of the new construction is in renewables. Anyone in the energy industry knows that depletion, EROI descent, and climate change are real problems associated with long-term fossil fuel usage. There are also well-known mineral resource limits and intermittency/storage issues with renewables.
There are voices, on the right and the left, that take extreme positions on the role of renewables and fossil fuels. Maybe not anyone in this thread, but the world at large is full of people advocating for an energy mix that uncompromisingly reflects their moral philosophy. Fossil fuels bad. Renewables will save us. Or vice-versa.
My point is that these extreme positions tend to dominate social media and news cycles - but they don't reflect the actual development of our energy systems, which take a more nuanced and balanced approach by necessity. ERCOT is beholden to actual results, unlike political advocates.
I appreciate the thoughtful response. You raise a lot of good points. I think we may just agree to disagree on ERCOT’s current role. For a nearly lifelong Texas resident, I always thought of them the way you’re describing them. Given the events and outages of the last three years, my perception of them now is that they are much more of a political animal than I had previously understood and frankly are not doing that great of a job of delivering actual results.
Again, reasonable people can disagree here, but for me personally, the Texas grid has gone from a point of pride about a well managed system that reliably delivers power to some of the most energy intensive industries in the country (to say nothing of a fast growing population in a not exactly temperate climate) to a creature of the governor and the legislature that’s failing at job one.
I understood the article as "renewables gave us a brand new 13GW in about 1 year", being about 1 year the key (actually, 3/4 or the energy installed in the first three months of 2023). There's no way you can get that amount of energy so quickly with any other energy source that is not photovoltaics.
The time to build a gas/coal power plant is around 4 years, and a nuclear power plant is around 7 years. Texas had huge problems demanding 69GW in 2021, yet in 2023 they demand 81GW and the grid provides. So yes, from 2020 to 2025 at least, renewables are "saving" Texas.
Texas, like most states, is red in the countryside and blue in the cities, with a purple gradient through the suburbs, with a twist: the usual red-leaning landed gentry is turbocharged with mineral rights - which were initially related to, but for any given parcel, not necessarily still connected with, ownership of the land on top.
So you get rich Republican rednecks who have a strong vested interest in the petroleum industry being willing and able to give them their due, either now or someday.
(Grew up in a red-leaning, increasingly exurban county between Waco and Austin, with roots in deep red East and West Texas, and in the economic class of people with "would pay off a small mortgage"-level hopes in mineral rights)
Texas is one of the most gerrymandered states to keep it those shades. Just look at the maps and see the shapes of the districts as evidence. Which makes me think how much more obvious the maps were in the state where SCOTUS, just ruled their maps illegal.
Texas is just a red state. Abbott won by more than 10 points in a statewide election. The cities aren't even that blue. Beto won Harris county by less than 10 points.
In Harris county, Beto ran only a point behind Biden in 2020. What’s happening in Texas is that the suburban Republicans aren’t RINOs as much as in other states. My suburban/exurban county (a good chunk of which is farms) voted for both McCain and Romney. But Biden did better here than he did in Harris County, even as Larry Hogan win the county by 38 points. Democrats can’t flip Texas without getting that suburban vote.
I believe it was my great-grandparents who sold their farm in Moulton, Texas, but kept the mineral rights, and as a result my father gets some fraction of a fraction of money out of it. It used to be close to worthless, but something about shale or fracking or other market changes has meant that he actually gets perhaps a few hundred dollars a year out of it now (or at least there was a good year or two in there; I'm not too up on the current state of things). I've never understood how this is supposed to continue - in theory, I'd get a further divide of it, but why would I get some right to go stick oil extraction equipment on some farmer's land because my ancestor lived there a century ago?
I don't know how you unwind such a system, but it seems like moving towards thinking of it as a collective resource of the citizens makes some sense, and I'm lead to believe that that's the way it's done in other places like Norway or Alaska.
Oh boy. You could write a book on mineral rights in Texas. Just kidding - it could fill a library.
If you’re interested in knowing more about what your family might own and how this works, happy to take some educated guesses. Just let me know if you’re interested, and I can pose a few general follow up questions to narrow it down. Smart of your great-grandparents though - my west Texan forebearers never retained any mineral rights lmfao.
By the way, for what it’s worth, Texas’s public university systems are in large part funded by state-owned mineral rights in West Texas which includes a little oil field called the Permian Basin. As a result, UT’s endowment is either comparable in size, or perhaps now larger than, Harvard’s famously large endowment (that’s what she said?). Obviously smaller on a per capita basis, but definitely the mineral resources of Texas do fund some public goods.
Final comment - I can still hear a quote from some game on unlocking part of the tech tree (Civ VI? Alpha Centauri?): “The meek shall inherit the earth - but not its mineral rights.”
Depends on in what form he's making use of them... most small holders end up leasing them to a bigger operator for a set period of time, with a cut to the agent who made the deal happen. Those leases have gotten a lot more lucrative over the past 20 years or so than they were in the 90s.
Texas will get state-funded universal healthcare and Tesla will be able to sell you a car right there in downtown Dallas before mineral rights are seriously reformed. For non-Texans: those first two things have two of the more powerful lobbies in Texas against them, but not the even more widely-distributed power of mineral rights holders.
It very much is on all those axes, even if it does have some hightech/liberal urban centres.
In re: other points, much of the "energy capital" is due to its long history of oil and gas extraction, and the disconnected grid is arguably a bug rather than a feature. Even if they don't want to maintain grid sync, a HVDC link east and/or west would be of significant benefit to cost and stability.
Texas is a large state, which makes these statistics weird - the cliched example for large states is that California has more republicans than most red states.
The disconnected grid is to avoid any federal regulation (because a connection across state lines would obviously count as "interstate commerce"), which seems to have real value given the current clusterfuck of a political environment.
Considering that this lack of regulation resulted in Texas being only ”seconds and minutes” from a months-long blackout in 2021, I disagree that it is a good idea.
Having lived on the east coast with blackouts lasting up to a week with some regularity and in Texas with one major blackout from a historical event.. I'll stick to Texas.
> More than 160,000 of their customers in East Texas and Louisiana remain without power as of 4 p.m. Sunday. Some Texans may have to wait for full restoration until June 23 — a week after losing power, the provider said.
> An Enhanced Fujita-1 tornado measuring a half-mile wide caused severe damage to homes in Panola County in East Texas on Friday before moving to northwest Louisiana. The tornado had winds up to 110 mph with a 7.78-mile path length, according to estimates from the National Weather Service.
Are you expecting Texas to roll out Tornado proof lines?
I don't think the problem there is regulation, but scope of storms and suitability of undergrounding transmission lines in the local geography. Maybe a bit of regulation there, although it's at the state level: under WA law, my utility has to charge affected users the additional costs related to installing wires underground and must gather their consent, unless there are special circumstances that allow them to pay for it out of general funds. This usually means not a lot of undergrounding, because people usually don't want to pay the costs.
Maybe “months-long” was hyperbole, but the (former) CEO of ERCOT has stated that it would take weeks, if not longer, to do a black start of the grid. I’m inclined to believe that as a baseline since statements like that make him personally look bad.
> avoid any federal regulation (because a connection across state lines would obviously count as "interstate commerce"), which seems to have real value given the current clusterfuck of a political environment.
Could you explain the practical advantages of this and which federal regulations the state is better off without? What particular details of federal energy regulation are bad?
(Besides, given Wickard vs Fillmore I'm not convinced that disconnection would be enough to avoid incurring commerce clause regulation given a sufficiently motivated supreme court)
Even Ted Cruz had to back down on the Texas swagger about ERCOT saving the state from communistic FERC after hundreds froze to death. Care to explain how you are immune from this reflection?
Yes, natural disasters happen in every state that kill thousands of people every year. A freak blizzard that plunged TX below freezing for more than a week straight, something I don't believe has ever been recorded in the state, caught the infrastructure off guard. Nature continues to throw curve balls at humanity, as ever.
It's not really "off-guard" when they were warned about exactly that issue in a federal report in... 2011 https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/08-16-11-re... and still have not followed the recommendations. That does not count as a curve ball for me. Especially when the report about 2011 says:
> Despite the recommendations issued by the PUCT in its report on the 1989
event, the majority of the problems generators experienced in 2011 resulted from failures of the very same type of equipment that failed in the earlier event. And in many cases, these failures were experienced by the same generators
It's just a delusional and brainwashed right winger interacting disingenuously. I notice they have yet to author a response as to what government regulations were good to avoid, but they have a canned response why it's fine that this debacle of a grid cannot keep up with a single winter storm.
Gigawatts of solar saved us when it was 104 F (40 C) but felt like 115 F (46 C).
The humidity of this heat dome has been murderous. FWIW, I'm right at the 30 N parallel along the same plane as Cairo.
My smart thermostat went into "eco" mode from the power company (Austin Energy), but I turned that off because I usually keep my inside temp at 77 F (25 C) 24/7/365. "Alexa, it's hot in here." and she nudges the thermostat (instead of playing hip-hop).
Some smart thermostats have links in their apps that search for local incentivized rebate programs. The mechanism of it is likely integration between the power company and the smart mfgr's cloud, especially to prevent blackouts during peak capacity shortfalls.
Edit: I have an ecobee4 (calls it "eco+") but I had a Sensi thermostat on PG&E that called it something else.
Interestingly, the true “redneck republican” states (e.g., Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia (historically, at least, though seemingly trending)) tend to have fully vertically integrated utilities (generation, distribution, delivery) and presumably have more control over maintaining quality of service.
Their retail prices are quite a bit higher, for now at least, but that differential may narrow as the states that deregulated their power systems rebuild the reliability gap.
Southern states are well managed when it comes to electricity and resources in general, with an average per kw rate of < 10 cents in 2021: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/
By burning a lot of coal and relying on older nuclear and hydro generation. Hopefully their politicians’ reflexive dislike of “green” things doesn’t cause their utilities to ignore the cheapest sources of power: solar and wind.
Also, at least in the case of Georgia, new nuclear power generation that went vastly, vastly over budget and I presume is not yet fully reflected in ratepayer bills.
At least they actually got some new units out of it, unlike South Carolina that spent billions and billions and shuttered the project.
> Texas have its own grid disconnected from West/East grids
Yes, and that's why people were freezing to death in 2021. Texas is worse than all the other "redneck republican southern states": they're all smart enough to be on the grid so they can get power from other states if there's some kind of emergency or disaster. Texas is far more stupid.
I wonder how many of those batteries are islanding-capable systems installed when people got cut off or hugely overcharged in the previous (winter) power crisis?
A lot. Neighbors round here all got solar panels or a generator hookup installed. Bidens infrastructure extended the solar credits by a decade making it even more appealing.
Natural gas generation never drops below ~40% period in this state, the novelty here is its losses from heat were covered to the tune of 35% of the mix last Tuesday.
PV generation maxes out at ~12GW, the bulk of our renewable energy comes from wind but it isn’t blowing this week ergo outsized natgas generation before the sun is up.
lol - investments in renewables suck the oxygen for investing in baseload generation out of the room, then get credit for saving a problem they promulgated? What a time to be alive!
The Fed should deploy market-making strats to bankrupt major crypto and shun exchanges industry-wide. Blockchain ledger immutability, smart contracts, and distributed transactions are good, but tying crypto to massive CPU use is expensive, wasteful, and climate-damaging.
A friend mines several non-PoW cryptos at home here in TX since there's no money in GPU mining anymore. Also, Helium, if that counts but it's really "Airbnb for LoRa".
Once a week or so, my utility (actually, a middleman wholesaler of power that they purchase from the actual generators, due to our deregulated electrical market structure) sends an email asking us to please limit consumption during the following day due to anticipated extraordinary demand.
My response is “get bent” - ERCOT has literally one job - grid stability - and the legislature had no business trying to attract crypto miners. So I’ll happily take advantage of the fixed priced electrical contract I entered into (nine cents a kilowatt hour) and keep my AC where I damn well please.
99% of time, it is literally my pleasure to act in pro-social ways according to the greater good, but I see no reason whatsoever why I personally should bail out the grid and state leadership from their political decisions.
I’ve spent plenty of time sitting in the cold or hot dark due to their mismanagement (probably an aggregate of about 10 days without power in the last three years), so when (if?) they’re capable of attending to the population as a whole rather than special interests, I’ll happy do my part. Until then, I’m simply going to continue to abide by the “every man for himself” ethos they’ve adopted.