high power prices in texas

Originally posted by thecurious1: ↑

Texas stands alone, disconnected from the National grid, minutes from total collapse.

"Texas' Power Grid Was Less Than 5 Minutes Away From Total Collapse

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas came within minutes of millions of people losing power "for an indeterminate amount of time," the power grid's CEO said.

Texas’ power grid was roughly 4 minutes and 37 seconds away from suffering a total collapse and a near statewide blackout for weeks or more during last week’s deadly winter storm, grid operator officials said Wednesday.

“If it stays out of balance for too long, as I said, generation units begin to trip off for their own safety,” Magness said, while estimating that the system, which supplies power to roughly 90% of the state, could endure only nine minutes below a constant frequency of 60 hertz before collapse.

In the early hours of Feb. 15, however, the grid did drop below 60 hertz and stayed there for 4 minutes and 23 seconds, he said.“We could not stay there long.

We could not go lower or we would have risked a blackout of the entire system and that is the thing that we cannot allow to happen,” Magness said. “Because if we have a blackout of the system the system is out for an indeterminate amount of time and it’s extraordinarily difficult to bring it back. We may still be here today talking about when is the power going to come back on if we had let the system get into that condition.

”In order to raise the grid’s frequency, grid operators ordered additional blackouts. Magness called this “the only way that we could get back to 60 hertz effectively.”"

https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/texas-power-grid-total-collapse_n_6037a52cc5b69ac3d35cc68b?ri18n=true

Expand

It's clear that Texans simply don't have a clue how to run their grid. Listening to the incompetent ERCOT CEO in his CNN interview, it's even more clear. I'd say there are a number of factors here, and if they don't get fixed, this will happen again:
Generators need to be winterised (I assume they are already tolerant of extreme summer weather). Because of the tech, this will be quick and cheap for wind, and expensive and slow for gas which is one of the biggest generators.
Without an interconnector to the federal power grid, the Texas grids need batteries. Grid stabilisation was a huge problem. Adelaide's Hornsby (Tesla) battery has prevented blackouts in SA Vic, NSW and even Queensland as it comes on in a fraction of a second and allows new power sources and emergency sources the time to power up. Old coal plants are notorious for tripping - they need back up.
They need to get rid of the idea of small government. The Texas government needs to accept that providing essential services is their responsibility. They can't just handball it to the private sector and say it's not their problem.
They need to put competent people in charge of infrastructure, and stop regarding those jobs as rewards for incompetents who support the Republicans.
Republicans need to grow a pair and accept blame, learn from it and move on. Cruz blamed his daughters, Gov. Abbott blamed the Democrats when it was the Republicans brought in wind power (George W Bush). Just man up for once.