This video gives a good account of what happens when a grid operated as a privatised auction minute to minute to provide power rather than centrally planned and operated system with reliability rather than profit as it’s overriding consideration faces adversity.
Coming to a suburb in EZFKA sometime soon…
Thanks for this. My takeaways are that Texas actually did an amazing job, from a technical perspective, of managing through this crisis, from the starting point they found themselves in. They protected the infrastructure and had power back on in a couple of days.
Just imagine how something like this would be handled in the EZFKA. The electrical regulator would be staffed by a mix of:
At the very top would be the “somebody important”. Political party hack appointed to the energy portfolio because he couldn’t be trusted with anything important.
The EZFKA grid would’ve fallen over in Feb and would still be down. Government would be importing 200,000 more “engineers” as the plan to fix it.
Top tier is the managerial class. They are good at managing people apparently and don’t need technical ability. If not from a political appointment, then from BCG or some other management consultant.
I hear that they are good at managing people to achieve results, particularly when those people are good and need no managing.
When the good people leave and results turn to brown, they are very good at deflecting any blame onto the remaining people.
Then they get promoted or take a on other internal role for which they take no accountability.
This is the EZFKA way. It is particularly so in the EZFKA departments that are taxpayer funded – banks, utilities, public service.
Small business that actually has to deliver products or starve doesn’t tend to have a lot of managerial folk.
The point is they shouldn’t have found themselves in that position to start with. That position is the result of privatisation, see below for more.
In a utility these days, the EZFKA way is to outsource all the manual doing things. Three days ago, a new townhouse block needed to be connected to the grid. It wasn’t the utility company doing it, but it was contracted out. The only lower levels are being thinned out and outsourced
Also I think that this is a good illustration of how some challenges are physical rather than economic/financial engineering.
At the end of the day, very severe weather caused about a third of the generation capacity offline.
the price of gas doesn’t mean jack in that situation. The only fix would have been to have 30% surplus generation capacity to begin with, and that’s a silly solution if it’s only purpose is to weather a 1 in 50 year storm. 3 days without power every 50 years seems more sensible than running 30% excess generation.
The point is that a 1 in 50 year winter storm isn’t the only stress that can cause problems.
The reality is that you run a significant excess of generation capacity most of the time anyway, although that excess is falling here in australia as rolling blackouts and power shedding such as shutting down Aluminium smelters and other large consumers on very hot days in summer become more common. Where I used to work was a large site and several times a year in summer we were notified of activation of stage 1 power shutdowns, with further to be done up to full shutdown of the entire site if required, so this is not just hypothetical.
This is off a base of existing government built assets. As the video explains there is no incentive(in fact an active disincentive via massive price spikes on shortages) to have excess generation capacity available under the free market auction regime.
As more of the government infrastructure goes end of life there will be no incentive to replace it until rolling blackouts are happening 30-50% of the year as otherwise that generation capacity will sit idle.
The only way it makes sense to build to cope with peak, or very near peak demand that happens maybe 30 or 60 days a year is with a central authority that dictates who supplies power and when to spread that idle time over the entire generation system.
Does rolling blackouts 30+ days a year sound like a good solution? My prediction is that is where we are headed, or the government will have to build capacity just to supply those peaks and therefore concentrate the losses there rather than across the entire network.
As always in the EZFKA, privatise the profits, socialise the losses.
I understand what you’re saying in terms of incentives and I agree with the principles.
But then we need to talk about scale – fiddling with the incentive knobs might result in capacity of say 10% > peak being maintained. But not 30% or 50% – that’s too expensive. too expensive for what? Too expensive to avoid the risk of 3 days without power every 50 years. And if we go down that road, why not have 100% excess capacity, to cater for the 1-in-200 year storm?
Remember the gold-plated poles and wires outcry in some state a few years back…? That’s was much smaller scale if I remember.
EZFKA doesn’t really have heavy industrial users like smelters to shut down to reduce demand, so it’s got that going against it as well.
Anyhow, if we are talking about significant over-capacity as insurance you’d need to consider other options. A cheap one is a $500 generator and 200L of diesel fuel at each house.
Actually it’s probably a more expensive option at scale. But even if not, we could afford to have that redundancy in the system 30 years ago.
In the last decade I have had a 3 day blackout and a 6 day blackout. In the mumblemumble decades before that I have never even had a blackout lasting more than a day.
Why? Because privatisation, profits and using the bare minimum of people to get the job done day to day. When non day to day occurs there is no extra capacity to deal with it any more.
What used to be covered in our bills as extra capacity for contingencies has now been consumed as profit by the operators. Which would you prefer.
Of course the horse has bolted but still…
I dunno – at scale that generator is probably only $100, if you’re buying 5 million units. Could maybe even make them here.
with all the other stuff I agree. The profit motive and fragmentation will of course result in much less redundancy & forward planning.
Getting a changeover switch fitted so you can actually use the generator with existing outlets etc would be required, and a $500 generator won’t run a full house so like for like maybe 5-10k for mains equivalent power per house.
https://www.commodoreaustralia.com.au/product/generac-guardian-stand-by-gas-powered-generator/
Not a bad estimate really 🙂
Nah, not mains equivalent – just enough to run a few applicances – fridge, computer, a few fans, kettle/hotplate.
not wired in either – just an extension cord from outside through the window.
We’re talking about surviving for 3 days every few decades. You’d need a strong bloke to start it though, after 10 years of sitting there. I think I know someone who could do mine.
The question is will it be three days every few decades though?
SA has already gone dark once. That would be child’s play to restart compared to the East coast grid.
Interesting that the Nuclear power plant had to be shutdown due to cooling water freezing. I always believed Nuclear would be the way to go if we ever entered another ice age (not arguing timeframe or Climate Change).
Nuclear(and everything else) works fine in those temps in areas where that is not unusual as it has been built for that sort of weather. The problem is texas doesn’t normally see that weather so infrastructure wasn’t built to cope.
Yes, that’s an important point. The Russians don’t take their generation offline jsut because it’s 30 below 0.
The infrastructure could be built with weatherproofing to cope with arctic conditions every winter, but that’s a loopy thing to do in Texas.
Thanks for clarification.
Fascinating video – very informative. Thanks!