Not arguing against your overall point, but Texas is a well-known lesson in failed power grid management, market design, and policy - which in combination is the driving force behind the current economic energy opportunities.
I say this as someone in the energy industry who operates many renewable assets across the U.S., some in Texas, and participates in the markets. Texas is a power nightmare, worst in the country. Everyone in Texas is investing in desperate immediate need and toa lesser degree, future potential, but that potential isn’t here yet and the cost of wholesale power spikes to egregious levels regularly.
I’m not even sure what your last sentence means (you got caught on the wrong side of a PPA during the winter storm I assume?).
I’ve been a market participant in every American ISO for over a decade and have helped build both thermal and renewable generation. I couldn’t disagree more and the numbers don’t back up your story.
You are stating a common misconception. That being that solar owners should be paying for anything other than the cost to push power into the distribution grid. The grid fees solar owners pay account for that. They should not be paid for supplying power at wholesale rates bc that assumes a wholesale power flow model, which is not physically applicable to solar owners who support the local distribution grid. If you look at the portion of the grid that a solar owner interacts with, how their power flows through it, the efficiencies of supplying that power locally are clear and should be at retail + distribution fees only. It’s the solar owners that are actually (marginally) subsidizing the non-solar owners in reality.
The utilities and ISO’s do not argue against this. They want to eliminate NEM 2.0 in favor of NEM 3.0 bc the difference in rates are to then be provided by alternative incentives such as battery pay-for-performance programs.
Disclaimer: I own an energy company that does C&I and Residential energy aggregation and participates in wholesale market energy supply and incentive programs.
I'm not sure I understand how what you say contradicts what the previous poster said? Can you elaborate? I think the point implied in the previous comment was that pushing into a grid locally is much cheaper for the grid operator than distributing power from a far away power plant?
My reimbursement for solar production takes about 6% for transmissions fees. I'm not sure which cost you are worried about but I make infrastructure payments. I don't think the electricity I produce travels more the 200 feet to my neighbors houses.
Well, my question would be whether retail minus 6% would be the prevailing rate in a free market with healthy competition, or is it a subsidy?
I'm not against subsidies. Germany pushing solar well before it made financial sense, enabling the economies of scale we see today, was one of the greatest wins of public policy in the 21st century. I paid a lot of tax when I lived there and was happy to contribute in some small way to that effort.
But subsidies risk turning into middle class welfare, continuing long after they make sense from a public policy point of view because interest groups form that don't want to give them up.
I read the parent’s comment as arguing that the existence of profits implies exploitation of workers in the quoted instance (p perhaps broadly in England at the time) and that there is some similarity with DeepSeek. No hard-line assertions, just suggested similarities.
Distributed energy resources eliminate a large portion of the transmission cost, leaving only the distribution grid in an idealized/future-state scenario (as I assume you’re talking about). In the summer, you lower the solar output so as not to overload the s distribution grid.
Also, batteries come in several long-term flavors. Thermal sand batteries are able to provide many months of energy storage today. A mid-term future will surely include even longer term storage as we develop improved storage technology. LiPo batteries are a bridge storage solution.
Regressive in that solar programs are not inflated, but do require distribution upgrades to realize their efficiency advantages over centralized power transmission. These distribution upgrades are costly to IOUs because they cut into their margins when the efficiency of distributed generation is considered.
Paying distributed generation export at retail rates or higher (DR, etc) makes plenty of sense because there are significant load, resiliency, and efficiency advantages to homeowners who are supposed to be the ones to benefit most from the grid.
The only change needed for solar users is a different meter swapped at the house that supports bidirectional metering. Solar power at the residential level only lowers overall demand in the neighborhood and on the grid, and in the very rare case where the net solar production exceeds the entire neighborhood's demand, PEC could choose to simply not use that excess (curtailment) and the meter at each person's house would accurately reflect that with no upgrades needed (Texan power utilities are not required to buy back excess solar). So the added cost to PEC is entirely optional. At its worst PEC was only crediting almost half of the power they were reselling from solar users (from originally a simple net credit), although they've thankfully been starting to backpeddle on that.
Honestly, I would prefer they simply charged the cost of swapping meters and adjusted the flat infrastructure fee for solar users (when necessary) for cases where upgrades are needed in neighborhoods with excess solar generation. Instead, PEC is able to resell solar power for a very significant profit with their current rates.
He’s saying Texas is hot for humans, which is objectively true. One’s willingness to tolerate it is subjective, but that’s not the point here. Don’t take it so personally.
You are uninformed. ERCOT is heavily influenced (“owned”) by Investor Owned Utilities (IOUs) and market makers that are profit seeking entities. This is true of all ISOs for all intents and purposes. It is the primary reason why the U.S. grid is slow to innovate/change, e.g., implementing distributed generation participation in wholesale markets, etc.
> If you have to verify the details of the work you outsource
Yes, they have to verify. Verification is necessary whether or not the component is sourced through a supplier or in-house. Verification happens after the sourcing step. And yes, you are criminally liable in the supplier case if your supplier commits fraud and you knew about it, as is the implication here.
Are they legally bound to do the verification themselves ? Seems like it would be more cost efficient to outsource that as well, which would just be prone to fraud.
I did not see it mentioned where they were aware that their suppliers were committing fraud. At these large companies the executives only look at the spreadsheets and take the contracts as fact, regardless if a third party can deliver.
It would only make sense that they would do it. We test materials randomly at one place I went to randomly. It wasn’t every piece or every batch, but we definitely sent off materials to labs to get tested. We weren’t under the eye of anything like the FAA either, we were doing it to just ensure QA that out gearing was made with quality materials and not junk. It’s not cheap but it’s not outrageously expensive either to get metallurgy checked to make sure it’s meeting your requirements as per the mechanical design.
I say this as someone in the energy industry who operates many renewable assets across the U.S., some in Texas, and participates in the markets. Texas is a power nightmare, worst in the country. Everyone in Texas is investing in desperate immediate need and toa lesser degree, future potential, but that potential isn’t here yet and the cost of wholesale power spikes to egregious levels regularly.