- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
Almost three years since the deadly Texas blackout of 2021, a panel of judges from the First Court of Appeals in Houston has ruled that big power companies cannot be held liable for failure to provide electricity during the crisis. The reason is Texas’ deregulated energy market.
The decision seems likely to protect the companies from lawsuits filed against them after the blackout. It leaves the families of those who died unsure where next to seek justice.
In February of 2021, a massive cold front descended on Texas, bringing days of ice and snow. The weather increased energy demand and reduced supply by freezing up power generators and the state’s natural gas supply chain. This led to a blackout that left millions of Texans without energy for nearly a week.
The state has said almost 250 people died because of the winter storm and blackout, but some analysts call that a serious undercount.
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It is almost like natural monopolies, such as primary power generation and supply, should be under the control of the Government and not private individuals.
They all used to be. Then Reagan and Clinton happened.
ding ding ding. We have a winner! Give that man a prize!
Thank you, thank you.
My prize will sit proudly in my woman cave.
Sorry but lemmy has declared you a male. Your penis will arrive in 3 to 5 business days.
I have a battery-operated one that gives me no drama or grief.
Hopefully that penis is returnable.
Best I can do is store credit.
If she really cared about her battery-operated penis, she’d use the store credit to buy it a fleshlight.
Please note; man was intended as species as in “give that dog a prize” I’m just a dead cat.
All good. :)
Woman caave… go on
Down, boy.
Well it’s probably got a tv, comfy place to sit, and video games
Most places that are not Texas still have something resembling the old school utility model where the state effectively grants a license to a private company to operate and manage the grid, which is itself a public right of way. This is governed by a state appointed utility board.
Can you point me to where I might learn more about this?
This is pretty good article about how and why.
Yep. Essential services should not be for profit.
For profit isn’t inherently a bad thing, but the more essential the service should warrant more and more regulations on safety security and pricing. They should not be given unlimited control over these.
Government agencies are more than capable of providing equally shitty service even without a profit motive, see: DMV. Any monopoly is. This is partially why regarding universal healthcare most people aren’t advocating for government owned healthcare facilities, but the government being the single payer to privately run facilities to control prices.
While government monopolies can absolutely create shitty services, the main difference between a government service and privately-controlled service is that the government (and hence, the people, in a democracy) has the power to direct the service on how to operate. The government can’t just shut down a private power supplier because their customer service is trash, and the individual consumer has no power as to how the service operates.
I assume the DMV being shitty is just a meme, like Taco Bell giving you diarrhea.
cause i’ve been in many DMVs, in several states, and never had a headache with it, and no one I know personally has had a problem either. Small sample base, of course.
No no… Checks the GOP playbook: we just need to offer a premium power support plan so if the power goes out they’ll provide you a backup generator. It just costs twice the normal rate.
I know your joking here, but this is actually the path forward and is being implemented in other states and countries.
The power company provides at a discount or for free a home backup battery to the residence. If not free, You pay off the battery at a very affordable rate but end up with a smaller power bill as the power company can access its power to balance the load, filling it up when power is cheap and the battery being used when power is expensive.
In a blackout, the home owner gets to use the battery and doesn’t suffer an outage.
It makes the grid more secure by dispersing it around thousands of homes instead of a large expensive failure points and gives them an improved ability to balance the overall load instead of needing a gas peaker plant.
I think it was recently announced that a Vermont power company was going to onboard 100% of their users in the next few years, but it’s happening elsewhere too. If a tree takes something down in a snow storm, people won’t lose power giving them time to fix it.
That actually seems like a really good idea on the infrastructure side. We should still get rid of private power companies.
We should still get rid of private power companies.
Absolutely.
Batteries are consumable though. Only so much usage available
An LFP battery will last over a decade of daily full discharges, and that’s not going to be what happens, and even then, it’s still 80%.
Probably looking at
30-4020-30 years before wanting to replace it due to energy levels.Peaker plants also require maintenance and staffing and other costs associated with them.
The batteries being consumable isn’t a problem.
Edit: and gas from a peaker plant is consumed too
That’s communism and we are a capitalist country.
The right thing to do under a capitalist economy is to buy the government and give yourself a monopoly.
This isn’t a natural monopoly, it’s protected by legislature and cronyism.
A proper capitalist approach to utilities, then the pipes and wires need to be considered no different then the road they are installed on. Recoup money by selling metered wholesale access to the carriers and utilities.
But we don’t have proper capitalism. We have this bastardized American version that sucks.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
We settled it before the damn constitution even started. How these nitwits in DC don’t see how publicly run infrastructure doesn’t provide for the common defense or promote general welfare is beyond me. But I guess running water, heat, affordable healthcare, and an ability to communicate with each other and the rest of the world doesn’t count under that, somehow.
Maybe if the courts took the founders intent from the Prologue instead of the secret letters to their mistresses, we’d have a functional system. But that’s just my opinion.
A government providing services is not communism, it’s a first-world standard.
I thought the sarcasm of my first two paragraphs was heavily laid on, but I suppose not.
I don’t disagree with you, however the majority of electoral college and senate voters agree with my first two paragraphs.
We are insistent that we must do things differently. This American Exceptionalism, as if there’s something fundamentally different between humans born inside its walls than the ones born out.
If we must be insistent that we’re different, we should at least be consistent in its application. The preamble basically implies that the ideal is exactly what you and the rest of my post is saying.
In the modern world a countries greatest strength is its ability to utilize its economies of scale. If for no other reason we should at least realize that the existing systems are unsustainably wasteful.
I’m sorry. I had someone argue something very similar to me. And since it was someone I knew IRL, I knew they were 100% serious…
You mean the dudes who owned slaves and thought that only white men were people? Ok yeah, they were righteous …
Many of them were either abolitionists or manumissionists. It’s hard to believe we had always been so conflicted since our founding (as many of the northern states had already abolished slavery before ratifying the constitution), yet still managed to have a reasonably functional government essentially made up entirely of rich white dudes who openly hated each others guts.
Also it’s easy to sit here and poo-poo the whole slavery thing now, 300 something years later. Washington got his first slaves from inheritance. When he was 11. That’s not me dismissing it, that’s just me demonstrating how normalized it was.
The issue here is specifically that they’re not monopolies any more, because of deregulation
Ironically, if they were a monopoly, they would have an obligation to provide power in emergencies, per the ruling.
So this is more like the spiderman pointing at spiderman thing.
Except instead of Spiderman it’s the Monopoly Man.
I believe cartel would be a better name for it in this case. ERCOT is a cartel.
Why did it take me so long to finally realize that by privatizing services like these, governments are preemptively shifting the blame when the service fails? Voters who are angry at the energy company won’t be (as) angry with the politicians.
What are yah, some sorta communist? /s He’s sayin private companies shouldnt be fuckin us over, get him! /s
Production can be liberalised, but it requires good regulation. Regulation failed to include a rule for responsibility to provided a minimum of energy, the judge can’t do more than the regulation law. It works in EU, we didn’t have blackout past year even though the situation was dramatic mostly due to the Russian invasion, because the liberalised market allowed efficient sharing of energy where it was most needed.
I wouldn’t be so certain a public monopoly could have managed it in such an efficient way (in terms of finance, energy usage and service). People tend to idealize public administration.
Texans must love the abuse, they keep voting for it.
Worth noting this ruling is explicitly based on statewide legislation, meaning this could be changed at any time, if the legislature cared at all.
You really do get exactly what you vote for.
There’s also a lot of voter suppression and gerrymandering.
Suckers with no self esteem.
This election’s got me so low
If they keep it up, people might pack up and go
Three cheers for privatization of public utilities! /s
As an aside, I am gutted by 250+ people losing their lives because Texan politicians can’t get their act together to hold companies responsible. Legislation works … and politicians can, and should, make the laws.
This was the second time it happened too. It happened ten years prior as I recall. So they did nothing then. Did nothing later. No responsibility for anything later. Fuck Texas.
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That storm was completely crazy though. I don’t think Texas has EVER experienced anything like it before.
That will be a yearly occurrence now.
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Maybe they decided the right people were getting hurt?
It’s less about the right people getting hurt, and more about the right people making bank (e.g. themselves).
Texas can always be counted on to take the evil side when a moral decision has to be made. Slavery, segregation, suffrage, bodily autonomy, companies’ “rights” over human rights.
They do have their act together. It just doesn’t include doing anything good for Texans.
Remember when conservatives blamed “windmills” for this? All while conservatives in charge of Texas raked in millions of dollars in campaign donations from ERCOT members. Conservatives will gleefully watch your family die for fun or profit.
A conservative is incapable of empathy or remorse. Be very careful in your dealings with them. They do not value the lives of others the way normal people do.
Conservatives will gleefully watch your family die for fun or profit.
From their beach cabana in Cancun, no less.
Rafael Cruz 😂
Canada apologizes for exporting that to America.
Don’t worry about it. We just assume Canada is too sane to support that craziness
Oh I wish that were true. The Conservative party leader, Pierre Poilievre (aka PP or Millhouse) is on the verge of becoming a Trump syncophant.
Do you mean Fled?
I thought there was a law passed where you have to call people by their ”deadname". If so, all should be calling him Rafael /jk
The greatest Canadian to ever live
Incapable of truth, too. As a lawyer, I will not take them on as clients. They lie constantly to justify their emotions. That’s really it.
But muh feewings!
As an aside, I used to live in a remote fishing area and we had tons of American visitors. I remember one woman told me she knew Obama was the devil because she felt “the evil” emanating from him.
smdh
Hot take: The ruling is accurate.
Vote for candidates who privatize utilities. Get what you vote for.
Only sucks for those that can’t leave and are stuck with a system they can’t correct.
Capitalism 👌
As one of those people who is stuck in the system I can’t correct: I agree.
I had to shit in grocery bags for a week because my toilet was frozen solid. But the blame only partly lies on the power companies. The vast majority of the blame lies on the regulatory agency who had the opportunity to require winterized gear for power plants… And repeatedly refused to do so.
Companies will always choose the cheapest option for whatever market they’re in. And winterizing all your gear is expensive when compared to… Well… Not. Could they have taken the initiative and winterized anyways? Absolutely. But if there’s one thing humans are generally really really bad at, it’s emergency preparedness. Because nobody wants to spend a ton of money building an earthquake-resistant home until after they experience their first earthquake. But that’s why building codes exist, to ensure everyone is forced to build to a minimum safe standard. To use this same metaphor, the building codes didn’t require winterized gear, so the companies didn’t build winterized gear. The fault primarily lies with the people who wrote the building codes, while knowing full well that the area could and would experience winter weather.
ERCOT is the regulatory agency that set those standards, and ERCOT is the agency that refused to require winterized gear. It wouldn’t be fair to penalize the power companies for failing to provide power, when ERCOT should have ensured their facilities were adequately prepared. It would also set a weird precedent to require companies to provide something in a disaster. Yes, they’re utility companies, and are subject to more regulation than most. But does this also mean they could be penalized for downed power lines during a tornado, or for blown transformers during a hurricane flood in Houston?
Right, but also power delivery shouldn’t be privatized at all. Sure the energy providers might not technically be at fault, but having a corporate middle man providing an essential service is ridiculous. We shouldn’t be talking about electricity providers as corporate entities at all. But you are still technically correct
That would take away their liberties!
I’m sorry you had to go through that, and even more sorry your vote isn’t joined by others in greater numbers.
Absolutely. Protecting profits and shareholders is priority #1.
GOP: “Cry more, peasants.”
How can a power company realistically be compelled to provide power, in an emergency? They cannot guarantee that any more than a police officer can guarantee their ability to protect you.
Such a law could only be there to create scapegoats for politicians to hang after they botch the response to a natural disaster or some minor event that significantly disrupts power distribution.
IMO it should be less about compelling them during an emergency as ensuring adequate disaster preparation and grid stability well before an emergency. Not much to do once the damage is already done other than figure out how to ensure it won’t happen again.
Friendly reminder about the event in question: the temperature wasn’t even THAT cold (minimum 0F IIRC). Much of the world deals with ice storms and freezing temperatures without the entire grid failing. I understand a state that deals with heat more than cold being less prepared for ice, but the lesson should need to be learned only once.
Of course, the problem as well as the solution was already recognized - distributed systems to provide redundancy. That would require being regulated nationally, which is far worse for them than some people dying.
SLOs and SLAs are a thing. And yes, they do and can guarantee power to enterprises that pay for it. So it’s not a matter of “if” but, like all things Texans, “how much”.
This exact problem is systematised in software and other infrastructure regions. Even hospitals for example have backup generators.
The problem is that power companies making resilient grids eats into their profits and so they won’t do it unless they’re compelled to
Power companies don’t make grids its the independent operator, in Texas’ case ERCOT, who reported on this potentiality many times but did not receive direction to require facilities to cold proof their gas infrastructure or mediate the risk through gas storage etc. The power companies can’t be held liable for what wasn’t required of them and the regulator can’t because they publicized the risk and recommended it. Ultimately it’s the government at fault.
I’m on board with this. It goes to my original coment, though. It’s not just the government’s fault. It’s the people’s fault for electing them.
This is the same for other jurisdictions as well, it’s just that emergency situations will be investigated. The northeast blackout is another use case in North America and it happened in August so things were much different. We’ve had ice storms that took out transmission infrastructure too. Ultimately the regulator in Texas case actually reported on these risks and recommended changes to regulations.
Cops don’t have to serve and protect or abide by the law. Power companies don’t have to supply power. People who sell you things can deny you access to them.
Hey this is fun, let’s do more!
Health Insurance companies don’t have to provide payment for health services you pay them to cover.
The more and more I hear about these terrible decisions made in Texas, no exception abortion (even if medically deemed necessary) and now this, the more and more I am grateful I don’t live in that trainwreck state.
A recent study showed that Texans have the least personal freedom of any state
Oh the irony
The whole social contract thing in the USA is giving off an EULA vibe these days.
Reminds me of Kimberly Latrice Jones’ chat.
that is the greatest compliment thank you
I hate this fucking state so much.
Deregulating the electricity industry has been a complete and utter disaster.
Phew. Worried this could lead to overturning that cops have no duty to protect you.
If you don’t like the service you’re getting then just vote in new leaders who can change things /s
Thankfully nobody in their right mind chooses to live in this state, those that remain were born with a death wish, or since sort of moral ambiguity to life.
Supreme Court: How expensive could it possibly be to sue a utility for breach of contract? $10?
Or they just can’t leave for one reason or another – moving is tough
First world, third world, and Texas.
Texas is a shithole, and even more insufferable are the Texan nationalists. It’s funny from a distance, but being there not so much.
#fuckyourdividends
In the opinion, Justice Adams noted that, when designing the Texas energy market, state lawmakers “could have codified the retail customers’ asserted duty of continuous electricity on the part of wholesale power generators into law.”
Wow, so helpful to say that 20 years after the fact
I agree with the problem, but I also kind of agree with the judge. The point of separation of powers is that the judicial system interprets the will of the legislative. We have had similar cases in Finland , where the law clearly should say one thing and the courts conclude that the law in fact says another thing. Fortunately, this situation occasionally leads the parliament into saying ‘well fuck’ and changing the law.
I will admit I don’t really understand the role of courts making law in the US and other common law countries, so it might be different there.
It’s a tough spot because most people, and maybe legislators themselves, didn’t think they had to write down “power companies must provide power to the best of their ability” and whatever other legalese that would force companies to do something about winterization. It feels like there should be an implicit “hey, if you’re aware of an issue that might kill people and destroy homes, maybe try to fix it.” The new laws around winterization are little comfort to those who have already lost loved ones to an avoidable problem. Of course, then you have litigious idiots who will sue because the tractor company didn’t say you shouldn’t try to play jumprope with the harvester blades. I don’t know what the solution is there, it seems we can only really be reactive.
Well, I guess the saying “regulations are written in blood” didn’t come from nowhere.
Well, they were providing it “to the best of their abilities”. With those maxed out prices, they were sure as hell trying to squeez out every kilowatt. Their abilities just sucked due to underinvsetment in reserve capacity. But you can hardly blame them for that. Unlike in most states, they don’t get paid for reserve capacity in Texas (and are not required to have any either). Therefore, whichever power company invests in it will have to raise prices, become uncompetitive and go bankrupt. Its not the companies to be blamed, its the politicians/officials who set up Texas electricity market like that. Capitalism can’t work if you don’t set up and regulate markets to align consumer and public incentives with company incentives.
I recommend practical engineerings video for technical details.
It’s not just about reserve capacity, ERCOT was warned about insufficient winterization after the last power grid failure due to cold weather, they just didn’t act on it. Should the Texas government have mandated improvements at that time? Absolutely. Do I still believe that ERCOT has at least some blood on their hands because they knew about the problem and chose not to fix it despite the hardship it could cause their customer base? Absolutely.
Also I have seen the practical engineering video, love that guy.
Unless I am missing something, ERCOT is a distributor. They don’t own the power plants and would have hard time forcing power plant owners to make those improvements without government mandate, no? Or does ERCOT already make similar regulations for plants?
My understanding is that ERCOT manages the reliability of the entire grid. I won’t pretend to understand the exact nature of their purview and powers, but I’ll defer to what Abott describes as their role in this incident:
Five days before the winter storm hit Texas, Abbott said ERCOT ensured officials that the power generator was prepared for the cold temperatures, and even issued notices to power plants to ensure they were winterized properly.
And the statement from ERCOT
ERCOT officials have said that some power generators implemented new winter practices after the freeze a decade ago, but they were voluntary.
Admittedly, I don’t know the extent of ERCOTs control over the individual companies that manage the generators or infrastructure of the power grid, but it does appear they had enough oversight to claim that the grid could weather another storm, which it could not.
Source: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/greg-abbott-winter-storm/
Well, even if they had no power to do anything, saying things have been fixed and are fine should make them liable. How should anyone (legislature, public) work on fixing the issue if they hide it? They should be the ones raising the issue in the first place.
Nah. Thanks for the info but I’m totally fine with blaming both the government and the shady utility company.
I mean, if it really is shady then blame away. I am just saying you can’t blame a company for not paying out of their own pocket for something the government should have secured.
It would be literally illegal for a corporation to do that. (breach of fedutiary duty, corporations are required by law to make as much profit for investors as they legally can. I am oversimplifying incredibly but it is mostly true)
The one time I remember something like that happening in the US was the 2003 Do Not Call telemarketing act. There was a court case that concluded that Congress had not properly authorized regulators to enforce the Do Not Call registry. Congress then took a day or two to pass a new law authorizing the thing they forgot to the first time.
This comes down to two things:
- Americans really, really hate taking telemarketing calls, regardless of party affiliation
- The telemarketing industry didn’t have significant lobbying at the time to tell anyone in Congress to argue against it
So bizarre, you’d think there would be some implicit realities of what is constituted by contracting for grid load power generation & even peaker plants. The grid has to be maintained to function and can’t lose frequency even if that does mean shedding there should be key named emergency services that should be maintained that would warrant liability on power generators. This is all upside with little cost or risk & also why there was no effort to coordinate because nobody is responsible.
As I understood it, critical circuits like hospitals were being prioritized and being kept (mostly?) online.
But house heating is generally not on a different circuit. They would normally rotate the houses which are blacked out so they would at least have power some of the time but this one was so bad all the power went into the priority circuits (like hospitals).
Rich people’s electricity stayed on, I’m just saying…
People seem surprised that the face-eating leopards who said that everything was going to be fine if you just allow deregulation of the market, proceeded to then eat the faces of the poors (but not those of the rich, at least whenever it could be avoided).
I’m not even kidding - see no /s - but in Texas, this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. This is what “lower taxes” means, bc you don’t get something for nothing; and when you pay less, you necessarily get less in return (even though the converse is not always true) - in this case lower robustness to perturbations of the system.
Texas does not have lower Taxes. That is a myth. Texas has lower Income Taxes. They more than make up for it in the other taxes and fees they collect. Texas is actively trying to force People from their homes such that wealthy connected folks can buy the property and rent it out.
Texas does not have lower taxes for the poors, but nonetheless it has lower taxes for the most wealthy citizens. Rich people literally cannot buy as much as the difference between what they make vs. the poors, so the lower Income vs. Sales taxes works in their favor, plus whatever other contributions they may make (charity, tips) they get to choose to hold back in return for services rendered - a building (or wing/floor of one) named in their honor, etc.
But since facts rarely matter, “lower taxes” is one major reason why people want to live in Texas, and why bills passed in Texas get passed - e.g. I was presuming that was how the disconnection from the federal energy grid was sold to the populace.
Even (especially) if it’s not strictly true, “lower taxes” is the reason for much that is done in Texas.
The Taxes are not lower, they were just shifted to the wage slaves.
Yes, but (a) a humongous proportion of people don’t know/care about that, compared to let’s say owning the libs, and (b) ironically they actually are lower, though only for those up top, thus providing the incentive to claim that taxes are “lower” there (when in fact, to the people they are aiming those messages at, they are higher).
shifting costs around to other sources of funding isn’t lowering costs. Someone else is paying the Taxes is all that has changed.
This is not even a taxes issue - it’s extremely short sighted regulation, or lack of. But, no sarcasm intended, if regulators don’t set any bar for reliability, I suppose it follows that companies aren’t liable for it.
“Short sighted” presumes that those who enacted it did not realize what effects it would have, but very likely they did, and this outcome is how they wanted things to go.
(1) Companies are free to make moar monay; and (2) the “only people who (should) matter” get electricity, when resources become scarce, whereas minorities do not. Bonus points if infants from the latter group die, thus keeping that population more “manageable”, in that “Pro-Life” state that is so against abortion that it would sooner allow the mother to die than to ensure that she receives lifesaving medical care, e.g. in cases of miscarriage or such where for anyone who knows anything at all about biology (or is willing to read through the definition of the word “miscarriage”) there is not even the remotest shadow of a doubt that there is no “child’s life” involved at all (anymore).
But it is complex a little bc those who write the laws are not those who vote on them. Even more foundationally though… well, this video explains it far better than I could: https://youtu.be/agzNANfNlTs?si=EX7LDD58Q5AOhHrY (if you need an intro to decide whether to watch the whole thing or not, use from 3 or 4 to 5:30 min from beginning)
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https://ncdp.columbia.edu/ncdp-perspectives/disaster-response-and-equity-texas-power-outrages/
edit - so it looks like it was less about being wealthy, and more about being white.
