[HN Gopher] More Solar and Battery Storage Added to TX Grid Than...
___________________________________________________________________
More Solar and Battery Storage Added to TX Grid Than Other Power
Src Last Year
Author : indigodaddy
Score : 95 points
Date : 2025-02-15 16:37 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (insideclimatenews.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (insideclimatenews.org)
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| 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).
| jfengel wrote:
| 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.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| 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)
| epistasis wrote:
| > 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:
|
| 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.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| how many us cities have public transport that is run by a
| private entity?
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| 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
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://www.texaspolicyresearch.com/federal-energy-subsidies...
|
| I think Lazard has info on costs before and after incentives.
| epistasis wrote:
| 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...
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://cdn.prod.website-
| files.com/612b0b172765f9c62c1c20c9/...
| parasense wrote:
| 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.
| epistasis wrote:
| > 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.
| WD-42 wrote:
| 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.
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _capitalists are choosing to install battery storage in large
| amounts_
|
| Texas is building massive amounts of natural gas, too. Solar +
| natural gas makes sense for America. (It doesn't for Europe,
| but whatever.)
| stogot wrote:
| > 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
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| tclancy wrote:
| Citation needed.
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| 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.
| stogot wrote:
| 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
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| 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.
| gnuser wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Nuclear and fission take at least a decade to build. You
| can build the same firm renewables in 2-3 years. Regime
| change will occur first.
| dralley wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| 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.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| 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.
| conradev wrote:
| 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.
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.)
| chasd00 wrote:
| 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.
| johnea wrote:
| Why choose? Farm both!
|
| 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...
| rossdavidh wrote:
| 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.
| vel0city wrote:
| > wind (which froze up, albeit not as much as the natgas)
|
| Just a note about how much wind froze up in Texas: wind
| outperformed projected supply for the cold snap.
| Animats wrote:
| 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.)
|
| [1] https://idc-
| online.com/technical_references/pdfs/electronic_...
| dralley wrote:
| IIRC they also had problems with the water intake at one of
| the nuclear power plants freezing up, so that had to shut
| down too.
|
| There's no magic source of power that is immune from needing
| to prepare for exceptional weather conditions.
| jwsteigerwalt wrote:
| 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"...
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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.
| conradev wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| johnea wrote:
| Well of course, why would anyone even use electricity unless
| an absentee investor was reaping ROI from it? Duh...
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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.
| hobs wrote:
| 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.
| conradev wrote:
| Interconnection is a separate issue from deregulation and
| they're considering it:
| https://www.houstonchronicle.com/projects/2025/southern-
| spir...
|
| The Griddy incident wasn't quite "price gouging" if you
| want to read about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid
| dy_(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.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| > 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.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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.
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| 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.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| 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.
| lovich wrote:
| 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?
| 0_____0 wrote:
| 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!!
| KerrAvon wrote:
| 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.)
| tim333 wrote:
| 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.
| tzs wrote:
| Would high property taxes really be a good thing for a
| state that has the highest income tax in the country?
|
| Texas has no income tax which is why they have high
| property taxes.
| craigmcnamara wrote:
| With an appropriate property tax regime you could cut
| income taxes.
| bhaney wrote:
| And as we all know, when a government _can_ cut income
| tax, they do.
| tzs wrote:
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| > 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.
| stogot wrote:
| IIRC that was Enron's doing. California suffered but Texas
| thrived despite some hiccups.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > 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.
| imglorp wrote:
| Economics wins, despite public policy and misguided ideology.
| Fossil loses in a windy, sunny state in a fair market.
| matt_heimer wrote:
| I guess we should be happy that there is now more solar energy
| produced than energy consumed by Bitcoin mining in the state.
| Super green! https://www.texastribune.org/2024/07/10/texas-
| bitcoin-mine-n...
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| 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.
| johnea wrote:
| Its an amazing phenomenon in Texas. I've seen a bunch of these
| wind and solar installations as I've driven through the state.
|
| 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)
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| It's a good question, but when discussing grid energy storage,
| there are 2 important things:
|
| 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.
| zidel wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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...
| timerol wrote:
| It's worth noting that for 2, projects are generally quoted
| in just "hours", with the storage capacity in MWh implied
| epistasis wrote:
| > 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.
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