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Texas power prices soared 20,000% Wednesday evening amid another brutal heat wave.
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Spot electricity prices topped $5,000 per megawatt-hour, up more than 200 times from Wednesday morning.
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The state’s grid operator issued its second-highest energy emergency, then later said conditions returned to normal.
They have an excess of energy (too much sun) but the grid is close to collapsing (too much cooling). Maybe install more solar power?
The problem is ideology. The Texas power grid is the end state of neo-liberalism taken to the extreme.
The belief that natural monopolies should be privately controlled with minimum regulations has lead to this. A power grid run for maximum short term profit with minimum investment. The grids poorly maintained, because that doesn’t make money. The grid is unfit, because implementing designs that cover the extremes is expensive. The price is excessive because the state is ideologically unwilling to intervene.
Many Texas leaders (and other Taxans) see any energy source that’s not oil and gas based as “part of the radical liberal agenda.”
Well yeah, being a manly man means being inconsiderate and destructive to the environment.
Oh, you care about nature? You want to be a steward of the Earth? Sounds gay. And gay men get beat to death and sent to hell.
Sure they do, then they get run the fuck over by the big money Capitalists who are building it anyway. Texas is #1 in renewable energy production for a reason.
Solar energy is also decentralized, so people/villages can have their own source of energy and the profits won’t go to one monopoly and that can’t happen, because free market - yes - but not actual free like this.