Quote: Sanguine wrote in post #135

---

response to a $2.1 billion bill for its power generation during the recent freeze.

---

ERCOT CEO Bill Magness Terminated by Board of Directors
ERCOT President and CEO Bill Magness was issued a 60-day termination notice by the board of directors Wednesday evening.
Brad Johnson
https://thetexan.news/ercot-ceo-bill-mag...+-+RSS+Campaign

The board of directors for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) approved the firing of its CEO, Bill Magness, Wednesday evening. The ERCOT board convened in executive session to vote on the measure.

The council said of the move, “The ERCOT Board of Directors met this evening and directed the Corporate Secretary to exercise the 60 days’ termination notice to [Magness] pursuant to the employment agreement with ERCOT.”

“During this transition period, Bill will continue to serve as President and CEO and work with state leaders and regulators on potential reforms to ERCOT. The ERCOT Board is expected to begin an immediate search for a new President and CEO, and will continue to discuss the transition plan at future meetings during this time period.”

Magness joined ERCOT in 2010 and has served as CEO since 2016. He previously served as ERCOT’s general counsel.-- excerpt, rest at link above --

Well, this summer we should know if they really fixed the problem or just sacrificed a few fairly useless types for PR purposes.

Texas death toll from February storm, outages surpasses 100
https://apnews.com/article/hypothermia-h...fdc93ea9d7cfa5f
By PAUL J. WEBER and JAMIE STENGLE

Texas death toll from February storm, outages surpasses 100

FILE - In this Feb. 23, 2021, file photo, Ricki Mills looks out from her home as she waits for a fire hydrant to be turned to get water, in Dallas. Texas officials on Thursday, March, 25, 2021 raised the death toll from February's winter storm and blackouts to at least 111 people — nearly doubling the state's initial tally following one of the worst power outages in U.S. history. (AP Photo/LM Otero File)

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Texas officials on Thursday raised the death toll from February’s winter storm and blackouts to at least 111 people — nearly doubling the state’s initial tally following one of the worst power outages in U.S. history.

The frigid weather also was blamed for dozens of more deaths across other Southern states including Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama.

The majority of the Texas deaths are associated with hypothermia, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. And the dramatic number of new victims is still a potential undercount, as officials continue investigating deaths that happened around the time the storm knocked out power to more than 4 million customers in Texas.

Many homes went without power or drinkable water for days after subfreezing temperatures, failing power plants and record demand for heat pushed Texas’ electric grid to the breaking point.

Texas officials earlier this month put the initial tally of deaths at 57 but warned it would increase. -- excerpt, rest at link above --

I had no idea the death toll was this high.

Yes, Overreliance On Wind And Solar Helped Feed Texas’s Power Outages
Correcting the record is important since assigning the wrong reasons for Texas’s electric blackouts will lead to the wrong solutions.
https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/12/yes...-power-outages/
By Chuck DeVore
April 12, 2021

When the lights went out in Texas earlier this year, corporate media and the left swiftly developed a narrative and stuck to it: Texas failed because it didn’t regulate enough and it wasn’t part of the national grid.

This storyline also claimed a lack of electricity from wind and solar had nothing to do with the disaster that claimed 111 lives. Instead, the blackouts were the failure of normally reliable thermal power—natural gas, coal, and nuclear—due to a reluctance to spend billions of dollars to winterize facilities throughout a state more known for persistently hot summers than for transient polar vortices.

A variant of this liberal argument was posited by Pedro Gonzalez at American Greatness. The headline echoed the corporate media’s main gloat over Texas’s misfortune: “When the Free Market Freezes Over.” Unfortunately, Gonzalez, as with leftist media and the environmentalists he draws upon, make a few assertions that turn out to be not quite so.

Correcting the record is important since assigning the wrong reasons for Texas’s electric blackouts will lead to the wrong solutions.
How Much to Blame Wind

Gonzalez starts with the observation that at the root of Texas’s failure is “an indictment of a bought, unresponsive, ruling class.” -- excerpt, rest at link above --

From the article above:

But unmentioned by critics was that ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) and Oncor, the Texas grid operator and one of its two large regulated electric transmission and distribution providers, respectively, inexplicably decided to cut power to the oil and gas fields, compressors, and pipeline infrastructure responsible for fueling the gas-fired power plants that were laboring mightily to keep the lights and heat on in Texas. Thus, human error played a role.

Additional natural-gas supplies were diverted to home heating needs during the record cold. Gas supply ramped up commensurate with electricity provided to the gas production infrastructure. The loss of power to oil and gas infrastructure was also made worse by an Obama administration environmental edict that forced the oil and gas industry to replace natural gas pipeline compressors powered by natural gas with electric compressors.

That regulated industries and the regulators who oversee them—ERCOT and the Public Utilities Commission of Texas (PUC)—failed to recognize the critical nature of Texas natural gas infrastructure was hardly a failure of the free market, as Gonzalez and the left allege. It was a failure of government regulators.

The article also notes:

Texas has rapidly become the nation’s leader in wind power largely due to a federal tax incentive called the Production Tax Credit (PTC). First enacted in 1992, the PTC expired in June 1999. It was extended for two more years in late 1999 with an expiration of Dec. 31, 2001. The PTC was expected to be dead by 2001 when, in 1999, the Texas legislature debated and passed its electricity deregulation bill, SB 7. SB 7 went into effect on Jan. 1, 2002. The PTC lay dormant until it was again revived by Congress in March 2002.

The PTC has a significant share of blame in Texas’s recent blackouts in that it incentivizes wind generators to push electricity into the grid even when an abundance of wind, typically in the middle of the night, pushes wholesale electricity prices into negative territory. Wind generators, some owned by foreign governments, can pay the grid to take their power and still make money because the PTC pays them federal tax money for every megawatt they produce. This economic distortion, deepened by Texas’s own property tax abatements for wind and solar, have acted to discourage investment in reliable thermal power plants.

This isn’t the free market in operation, as The New York Times and Gonzalez allege—quite the contrary.