Moderators: LawBeefaroni, $iljanus
Crazy how everything is more and more expensive and then a disaster drops prices.“The U.S. natural gas market will now be temporarily oversupplied as 2 bcf/d or a little over 2% of demand for U.S. natural gas has been abruptly eliminated,” said Rob Thummel, managing director at Tortoise Capital.
If you're selling diapers and baby formula?$iljanus wrote: ↑Mon Jul 11, 2022 10:11 pm I know that Texas' big selling point for business is their lack of regulations. But with global warming being a thing, the intentional isolation of their power grid and the probability that they never hardened their grid after the last time it shit the bed, why the hell would I want to move my business to Texas?
Lots of reasons.$iljanus wrote: ↑Mon Jul 11, 2022 10:11 pmI know that Texas' big selling point for business is their lack of regulations. But with global warming being a thing, the intentional isolation of their power grid and the probability that they never hardened their grid after the last time it shit the bed, why the hell would I want to move my business to Texas?
Of course, we'll have to see what fresh hell our legislature unleashes in the wake of Dobbs. But then again, if you're a company large enough to consider moving states for business environment, you can pick up out-of-state travel costs for medical procedures pretty easily.In the past couple of years, states such as California and New York have seen the largest outflux of residents, fueled by employees’ ability to work from anywhere and their need to escape dense urban environments. Many companies chose to follow their employees and relocate their headquarters to more business-friendly states in order to reduce their overall costs and improve efficiencies, but also to pursue further growth by accessing the highly talented employment pool generated by local universities.
Commercial Property Executive identified five states that attracted some of the most notable corporate relocations since the onset of the health crisis. The opportunities in these states, coupled with their local support systems, are hard to match by other environments in the country. This is why commercial real estate experts expect these states to continue to attract even more corporate relocations and expansions going forward.
With its pro-business climate, access to talent, solid fundamentals and low tax rates, Texas has seen more corporate relocations since the onset of the pandemic than any other state in the country. Most of these moves were part of the exodus from Silicon Valley, generated by California’s high tax rates and unaffordable housing costs that have made living and doing business difficult within the state.
Austin became a highly sought-after destination for tech giants such as Tesla, which announced its relocation from Palo Alto, Calif., to the metro last year. Data center powerhouse Digital Realty and Oracle also moved to Austin from Redwood City, Calif., in the first year of the pandemic. Other notable names include venture firm 8VC and software company FileTrail, both relocating from San Jose, Calif., to Silicon Hills due to their rapid growth and need to accommodate their rapidly expanding teams. CrowdStreet also opened a second office and relocated its corporate headquarters from Portland, Ore., in 2021.
Yes, and with roughly average results.coopasonic wrote:We are special in Texas because we are the only ones that told the rest of the country, no thanks, we'll go it on our own.
Unfortunately Google doesn't tell you that the problems are very different. MISO (the operator for the Midwest) for instance covers a huge area. It wasn't built for the whole mid-west to be 10-15 degrees above average at the same time. But that happens now.noxiousdog wrote: ↑Tue Jul 12, 2022 4:14 pm I get that y'all like to point at Texas as it's well worthy of ridicule, but let's not pretend that this is just a Texas problem. It takes two seconds of Google to see it's a nation wide power grid issue.
While both are a huge result of greed (Texas Power Grid issues AND Climate Change inaction), the first is fixable, but the second? Yeah, Dunno if you all saw that graphic of Texas Temps forecast, which also showed roughly half of New Mexico in flames, but that's going to be a huge issue in Texas, as well as Coastal/Houston area flooding. Those issues aren't as fixable withjust a bit more investment, like the grid and Heating/AC.$iljanus wrote: ↑Mon Jul 11, 2022 10:11 pm I know that Texas' big selling point for business is their lack of regulations. But with global warming being a thing, the intentional isolation of their power grid and the probability that they never hardened their grid after the last time it shit the bed, why the hell would I want to move my business to Texas?
It is absolutely real. There are several assessments that talk about the problems in ERCOT. It is no means the only system with risks - NERC 2022 Summer Assessment but again it has unique risks. If you want to get nerdy, you can compare multiple years. I'll give you a hint which region have seen Elevated or High risk in similar reports for the last 10 years at least. Still it is absolutely true that several regions have problems. This year saw more western regions fall into Elevated or High risk vs. 2020/2021. They are generally totally different problems but don't let that impact any analysis.Little Raven wrote: ↑Tue Jul 12, 2022 8:57 pm ND beat me to the punch, but yeah, the "Texas Power Grid Collapse" isn't real. It's one of the long running jokes of the forum, like Smoove pouring whiskey on his Cheerios or Chris Hemsworth calling hepcat for hair tips. (Patrick Dempsey locked hepcap into an exclusive retainership almost a decade ago.)
FWIW this is not an authoritative source used by anyone who works in the power industry or wants to understand power grid reliability. The metric they use for power grid reliability doesn't make any sense. Averaging outages across a region or state don't tell anyone much. When I worked in the industry we tracked actual customers who had outages, forced outages, uptime for power plants (which included allowances for planned maintenance outages), revenue + lost revenue, etc. This isn't a useful way to compare reliability because too much detail is getting chopped out that tells the real story.In real life, Texas is thoroughly average in the energy department - power is less reliable than it is in New York, but it is also much much cheaper.
It is at highest risk but it isn't uniform. The outages in California tend to be concentrated in PGE territory (which isn't all of California). Outside of PGE reliability is much higher. Another factor in California is that outages are often related to fire activity (though sometimes PGE starts the fires themselves.The Texas power grid certainly has challenges - but that's true of most of the country at the moment. California routinely leads the nation in terms of people without power - but nobody would claim that the California grid is "collapsing."
) This results in long-term outages that leave places sometimes off the grid for weeks/months. Another reason the average outage per customer metric isn't that useful.It isn't about 'falling apart'. It is about systemic risks and Texas has taken on excess risk. Where are the outages elsewhere due to poor maintenance elsewhere in the nation that led to hundreds of deaths? Where do we see multiple generation assets failing simulataneously at peak load periods? Where did these problems cause catastrophic failures twice in a decade? Texas.Power grids are big, expensive, complicated things, and we're asking them to change very quickly on both the supply and demand fronts. There are going to be issues. But nobody is actually falling apart....at least, not yet. (Depending on how serious we are about achieving renewable energy goals, though....Hawaii may have some real problems.)
I'll repeat it but I think people don't really know they had a major grid failure twice in 10 years. Both were "hundred year" failures. Except for the fact that experts predicted extreme weather failures were a risk before it happened. Also one of the economists who designed the market design says it doesn't work. But fuck experts amirite?
I have! Except it was a lot of jobs in two jobs. That's strategic cybersecurity consulting for you. You often have to dive deep into a new business and learn how it works. But in this case it goes beyond - I spent about 10 years in non-utility power generation (aka independent power provider) and oil & gas. Lots of overlap there. And I can deep dive into this stuff because I really know how those businesses work.
Of note:As temperatures soar above 100 degrees, power plants have even been forced to skip regular maintenance to keep cranking out electricity. That's helped keep the power on for now. But this short-term focus is putting even more stress on a system that's already stretched to its limit. And without getting the service they need to remain safe and functional, folks are worried about a total collapse. "Things are going to break," Executive director of Texas Competitive Power Advocates Michele Richmond told the publication. "We have an aging fleet that's being run harder than it's ever been run."
Last week, fear of a power collapse caused the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to initiate a rarely used emergency program that is triggered when supplies fall below a critical safety margin. The ERCOT, which operates the grid that serves more than 26 million customers, urged residents to cut power use during the hottest hours of the day and warned of a risk of rolling blackouts. People were asked to turn up [thermostats], defer the use of high-power appliances and turn off swimming pool pumps, according to Reuters.
The power collapse notice came after ERCOT began paying suppliers an average of $5,000 per megawatt hour to keep generators running. That price is the highest the grid operator pays. The council blamed forced outages at coal- and natural gas-fed power plants, and low wind power generation for the emergency protocol. "They were pulling a lot of levers to avoid going into emergency operations and rolling blackouts," President of Consultants Stoic Energy LLC told the publication. A spokesperson declined to provide details on the number or type of offline generating plants.
Climate change has made Texas heat hotter and longer lasting. Over the last 125 years, the average daily minimum and maximum temperatures have increased by 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit. And the state just experienced its hottest December on record since 1889. Addressing the power crisis, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner responded to ERCOT’s request with a tweet asking all city departments to prepare for the worst-case scenario.
I'm sure Texans will pull together and provide the conservation needed.Smoove_B wrote: ↑Mon Jul 18, 2022 3:11 pm Good luck resident TX folks:
Of note:As temperatures soar above 100 degrees, power plants have even been forced to skip regular maintenance to keep cranking out electricity. That's helped keep the power on for now. But this short-term focus is putting even more stress on a system that's already stretched to its limit. And without getting the service they need to remain safe and functional, folks are worried about a total collapse. "Things are going to break," Executive director of Texas Competitive Power Advocates Michele Richmond told the publication. "We have an aging fleet that's being run harder than it's ever been run."
Last week, fear of a power collapse caused the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to initiate a rarely used emergency program that is triggered when supplies fall below a critical safety margin. The ERCOT, which operates the grid that serves more than 26 million customers, urged residents to cut power use during the hottest hours of the day and warned of a risk of rolling blackouts. People were asked to turn up [thermostats], defer the use of high-power appliances and turn off swimming pool pumps, according to Reuters.
The power collapse notice came after ERCOT began paying suppliers an average of $5,000 per megawatt hour to keep generators running. That price is the highest the grid operator pays. The council blamed forced outages at coal- and natural gas-fed power plants, and low wind power generation for the emergency protocol. "They were pulling a lot of levers to avoid going into emergency operations and rolling blackouts," President of Consultants Stoic Energy LLC told the publication. A spokesperson declined to provide details on the number or type of offline generating plants.
Climate change has made Texas heat hotter and longer lasting. Over the last 125 years, the average daily minimum and maximum temperatures have increased by 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit. And the state just experienced its hottest December on record since 1889. Addressing the power crisis, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner responded to ERCOT’s request with a tweet asking all city departments to prepare for the worst-case scenario.
BREAKING NEWS: Flights in and out RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire have been halted because the "runway has melted" in the hot weather, Sky News understands.
My nominal cutoff for walking is 75 degrees when I leave around 9 a.m. I'll fudge that to factor in humidity and cloudiness. This morning it was 77, but cloudy, but also humid. I decided to walk anyway and had to cut it short after working up a major sweat on Millionaire Mountain. I only completed 2.25 of my 3.1-mile route.LordMortis wrote: ↑Mon Jul 18, 2022 3:53 pm I can't imagine being heat sensitive and living in a place where it's hot 3/4s of the year. I keep my house at 75 in the summer and that's too hot for me. When it's 85 plus out the AC is on waaaay too much just keeping my small house cool. However, since quitting my job, I'm in shorts all the time so I don't get home and sit in my underwear trying to keep cool at 75. I try to do my walks in the morning before it 70 when I can and I come home soaking wet with sweat. I overheat from 80-90 minutes of walking when it's a pleasant 55 outside.
108? Even in the dry heat? Fuck that shit, I'm out.
I really need to tool my basement for my day to day living and then set thermostat to 80 in the summer. Maybe these incremental energy price increases will finally see me do that.
