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To: John Koligman who wrote (201765)	2/16/2021 5:18:16 PM
From: DinoNavarre	Respond to of 206126

All part of moving away from a base-loaded grid.....

To: John Koligman who wrote (201765)	2/16/2021 5:22:32 PM
From: Sweet Ol	3 Recommendations Recommended By diegosan DinoNavarre sixty2nds Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 206126

The real problem in Texas is all those Californian people moving to Texas and using way too much gas and electricity<ggg> Blessings, SOJ

To: John Koligman who wrote (201765)	2/16/2021 7:00:55 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	Respond to of 206126

What has sent Texas reeling is not an engineering problem, but a financial structure for power generation that offers no incentives to power plant operators to prepare for winter or other interruptions. In the name of deregulation and free markets Texas has created an electric grid that puts an emphasis on cheap prices over reliable service. This is the same Enron-concept that witless Pete Wilson, former Republican Governor of California, found so attractive - creating similar problems in the past in regions of California which bought into this Texas-Enron concept - regions outside of the Los Angeles DWP region which saw this concept as the foolishness it was. It’s a “Wild West market design based only on short-run prices,” said Matt Breidert, a portfolio manager at a firm called TortoiseEcofin. The temporary train wreck of that market Monday and Tuesday has seen the wholesale price of electricity in Houston go from $22 a megawatt-hour to about $9,000. Meanwhile, 4 million Texas households have been without power. Edward Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston, said the disinvestment in electricity production reminds him of the last years of the Soviet Union, or of the oil sector today in Venezuela. At a moment when the world is awash in surplus natural gas, much of it from Texas wells, the state’s power-generating operators were unable to turn that gas into electricity to meet that demand. In the single-digit temperatures, pipelines froze up because there was some moisture in the gas. Pumps slowed. Diesel engines to power the pumps refused to start. One power plant after another went offline. Even a reactor at one of the state’s two nuclear plants went dark, hobbled by frozen equipment. Throughout the Southwest, he said, there has been a scramble for gas as sources have gone offline. Most surplus gas is stored underground, he said, and bringing it to the surface becomes more and more difficult in such prolonged low temperatures. March futures for natural gas are selling for $3 per million BTUs in Oklahoma, he said, but the spot price hit $600 over the weekend. In Texas, production of natural gas Tuesday fell 6 billion to 7 billion cubic feet per day from earlier in the month, Anne Swedberg Robba, head of American gas and power analytics for S&P Global Platts, wrote in an email. Nationally, production has dropped by about 14 percent. “But this is not the first time we’ve had this issue in Texas,” said Hirs, of the University of Houston. There was a severe cold spell in the Southwest in 2011, and frigid weather in 1983, 1989, 2003, 2006, 2008 and 2010. A study by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. of the 2011 event, which also led to widespread blackouts for much the same reasons, found that “the massive amount of generator failures that were experienced raises the question whether it would have been helpful to increase spinning reserve levels going into the event. The anathema of the Enron free market concept. This action would have brought more units online earlier, might have prevented some of the freezing problems the generators experienced, and could have exposed operational problems in time to implement corrections before the units were needed to meet customer demand.”