[buckle8017]

The Texas grid was deregulated in an era where solar and wind were not price competitive.

The price competitive producers were all stable fossil fuels, natural gas and coal.

They failed to take into account unreliable low cost producers forcing reliable but marginally more expensive producers out of the market.

If solar/wind producers had to guarantee power 24x7 at fixed rates the cost would vastly exceed natural gas costs.

They just need to change the contract requirements to match reality.

[HillRat]

During "snowmageddon" and similar winter outages fossil fuel shoulder load also broke down, since the dynamic pricing market doesn't pay to keep spinning capacity, and the plants couldn't start up, which is why the cost curves went berserk: the price pressure escalated to try and incentivize production, but the production wasn't to be had. (The JIT nature of Texas LNG logistics also played its part; some gas turbines would have been able to start up, but couldn't get LNG to do so.)

Absent turning the Texas energy market into a more rational design (I was part of the energy market during dereg, these failures were predicted by our energy economists at the time), the state should mandate weatherization for wind generation at a minimum, and look into grid-scale battery requirements as prices fall and technologies mature.

Solar and wind are fantastic opportunistic power generators that work well together and should be a significant part of any grid's energy mix going forward, but the state needs to act like every other power market and pay for spinning fossil fuel capacity for shoulder and peak demand. Picking energy mix winners and losers is just political meddling in what was supposed to be a free market environment.

[Calwestjobs]

build better houses,

and in process lower your household energy need

BY INCREASING comfort.

BREEAM / Passive house.... In passive house in norway (alaska of europe) you can be 3 days without electricity(or gas or any other heating medium) and in coldest of cold days you do not need to put sweater on, because it is still comfortable, heat is not escaping as fast.

so there is deregulation of market and there is not educated customer + educated regulation which bankrupts your company if you build trash like they mostly build in USA. so it is not only energy, there are other regulation not in sync with reality/human nature.

and by lowering your household energy needs(by increasing comfort), higher ratio of renewables can be used cheaply or even onsite/roof.

and your energy requirement can be manipulated more in time i.e. you can heat house few degrees more few days in advance. after you see on tv that next few days will be cloudy/stormy/ hurricane/frost... or just make app do that for you

or you can heat your hot water at noon where electricity prices are almost 0$

so less effort providing energy for household is, more effort can be put into providing energy for business

[Calwestjobs]

exact thing which was directly responsible for snowmageddon...

build better houses, use saving in energy to buy more things. hard capitalism. but no that is bad. :)

socialism inside of a energy market is good for people raised in capitalism. makes no sense to me.

lowering households energy need 100% in instant is like providing 25% more energy generation for everything else.

[epistasis]

> If solar/wind producers had to guarantee power 24x7 at fixed rates the cost would vastly exceed natural gas costs.

I think Texas' market right now is completely disproving that point. The amount of batteries being deployed everywhere are showing that storing solar/wind for a fraction of the day is going to be a lot cheaper than having tons of gas.

[bee_rider]

More pricing transparency is needed, not some onerous mandatory contracts. If users can deal with intermittent power, they should be allowed to accept the discount that comes with that.

[naasking]

> If solar/wind producers had to guarantee power 24x7 at fixed rates the cost would vastly exceed natural gas costs.

Possibly, but neither usage nor generation is 24x7 at fixed cost, so what would be the point of that requirement?

[bee_rider]

Artificially hamper renewable uptake.