The U.S. Department of Energy Thursday announced a $1.5 billion transmission investment to improve electric grid reliability. The DOE also released a new electric grid transmission study.
The projects will enable nearly 1,000 miles of new electric transmission development and 7,100 megawatts of new capacity in Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.
the fact that texas’ jank ass disconnected grid is getting a dime of federal money is frustrating. they want their own grid, they can have it. if they want federal dollars to fix what they broke then they should be forced to connect and follow the same rules as everyone else.
It’s paying to rebuild infrastructure where the state government has been neglecting. I’m sure part of it will be to rebuild what’s been destroyed by the hurricane.
So bailing out who? Sounds like they’re bailing out the people by building a more resilient energy grid, which some might instead define as an investment in the future
As I understand it, Texas republicans pushed to privatize the state’s electrical grid, and allow “provider choice” in way that has led to extreme profit-taking by private entities and reduced any investment in infrastructure. This contributed to the extremely high prices that some Texans have been paying in the winter, as well as more frequent and sever outages.
We could consider this a bailout because private entities sucked all the money out of the system, and now the federal government is investing to try and get it into a working state again.
Texas is solidly in the lower half of US states for residential energy costs. You probably read about some people who bought into a “wholesale” energy provider who got fucked during the winter storm in 2021, but that situation involved a very small number of people who made a bad choice and does not generalize to the whole state.
I honestly think the inverse of what you’re saying is true…Texas invested billions in the 2000s in transmission capacity between West Texas and where everyone lives in Central and East Texas, opening up West Texas to wind and solar development. Texas is now #1 in wind generating capacity and #2 in solar, after California.
All that mess that happened in 2021 was due to corruption within the Texas Railroad Commission, which had the power to force natural gas electric generating facilities to winterize but did not do so. When the temperature dropped to 4°, the natural gas plants froze and went offline almost all at once, causing an immediate drop in power supply necessitating severe and immediate power cuts statewide to protect the grid from failure. Circuits were reenergized slowly over the following few days, but it stayed really cold for really long. I had personally never been through weather even remotely like that in my 35 years in Texas.
All the other outages you’ve heard about in Texas were mechanical outages, localized areas where power lines were damaged by weather, like Austin in the '23 ice storm or Houston after Hurricane Beryl this past July. People on here generalize these to “Texas’s grid is failing again!”, but every state and every nation faces the same challenges with weather-related mechanical outages.
Texas’s grid is crap. It’s far too unregulated and operators do not focus on the right sorts of improvements that will enhance grid stability. Sure, production is great, which means prices are low, but when you ignore warning calls, you invite disaster. They knew, and they chose not to enforce regulations that other states enforce. Other states deal with far colder weather. This was a failure of regulation. And they also fail to maintain basic system design, so a normal power fault can grow out of control to take out power to most of west Texas.
Anyway - sorry. That’s just a pet annoyance of mine. I hate it when pro-corporate governmental policies are seen as a positive thing based on limited metrics. Lower rates amidst poorer performance is not what I’d consider a marker of success. People die, have their homes and property damaged, and lose a lot of money during power outages.
While the chronic underinvestment in their infrastructure is still an issue, the recently announced infrastructure investment is geared toward transmission and generation, which wouldn’t (directly) address their reliability woes.
It seems to me that the goal of this allocation is to build generation capacity in states with space for solar (and possibly wind, although the Biden admin isn’t trying to bootstrap the wind industry in the U.S.). And also build transmission capacity to get that power out of those states and into other areas of the country. (And possibly back in, should they face local problems.)
My hunch is that they want to get some of that renewable power out west, to have a backup the next time the Colorado river/areas that currently get power from the Hoover Dam suffer from a drought, and to feed power up to the east coast so they can decarbonize more easily.
It’s paying to rebuild infrastructure where the state government has been neglecting.
Besides Texas, none of those states listed are population dense or otherwise rich. In fact the low population density may require the cost per subscriber to be significantly higher because more infrastructure is required to bring service to fewer people. This is a perfect example of good federal government spending.
Is your preference that if these regions can’t afford to build/maintain this infrastructure they should go without?
The packaging says reliability, but the description within the article looks less like neighborhood reliability, and more like national grid reliability.
Specifically, those grid interconnections - the Cimarron Link, Southern Spirit, and Southline. Cimarron will connect Texas to massive wind farms in Oklahoma - power that isn’t going anywhere. It’ll connect Texas to Mississippi (Southern Spirit), and Texas to Tucson.
I don’t know about the Mississippi connection, but Tucson is connected to Hoover Dam, which means that losses from transmission be damned, once this is all done, power from (at least) Oklahoma can be sent to LA the next time Lake Meade dries up, with the possibility of power from the east coast finding its way to the west, and vice versa.
As other commenters pointed out, Texas already has some of the least expensive energy in the country, so adding capacity doesn’t make a lot of sense. And transmission lines only adds reliability in the sense that there’s more supply, but most of their failures are not supply related. My understanding of the adding capacity part is just a dovetail into adding solar capacity to states with a lot of land that will become increasingly useless for farming as the climate changes. It just so happens that Biden is trying to create a U.S.-based solar panel and battery production industry. Not a bad strategy to throw cash into generating/subsidizing demand at the same time as we start adding tariffs to imports of those products.
(It’s not like, a great strategy, either - because unless the U.S. is willing to subsidize their market longer than China is willing to subsidize theirs, then the U.S. will not really ever have a competitive industry, but I guess if they view it as a matter of national security, then it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t make sense.)
So it’s a bailout
the fact that texas’ jank ass disconnected grid is getting a dime of federal money is frustrating. they want their own grid, they can have it. if they want federal dollars to fix what they broke then they should be forced to connect and follow the same rules as everyone else.
I think a small portion of Texas is connected to the federal grid. Maybe this would extend that?
There was an article posted today on /c/texas (Lemmy World, I think) about them actually connecting to the national grid.
I guess there actually was a cold day in hell…
This was planned, it’s a cycle.
Claim Big government is destroying XYZ. (This gains points with dumbasses)
Disconnect or shut down XYZ, while gutting it for profit.
When XYZ fails, blame libtards, and quietly get bail out from Feds who now pay to fix XYZ.
Profit
Restart at 1.
This has been the conservative play book for 20 years in US.
it does appear that ERCOT finally saw the writing on the wall. i’m not opposed to giving texas money for their grid if it means they will be subjected to the same federal oversight that occurs elsewhere. https://www.energy.gov/articles/biden-harris-administration-invests-15-billion-bolster-nations-electricity-grid-and-0
I understand why you would be cynical but don’t understand at all how you came to that conclusion
It’s paying to rebuild infrastructure where the state government has been neglecting. I’m sure part of it will be to rebuild what’s been destroyed by the hurricane.
So bailing out who? Sounds like they’re bailing out the people by building a more resilient energy grid, which some might instead define as an investment in the future
As I understand it, Texas republicans pushed to privatize the state’s electrical grid, and allow “provider choice” in way that has led to extreme profit-taking by private entities and reduced any investment in infrastructure. This contributed to the extremely high prices that some Texans have been paying in the winter, as well as more frequent and sever outages.
We could consider this a bailout because private entities sucked all the money out of the system, and now the federal government is investing to try and get it into a working state again.
Texas is solidly in the lower half of US states for residential energy costs. You probably read about some people who bought into a “wholesale” energy provider who got fucked during the winter storm in 2021, but that situation involved a very small number of people who made a bad choice and does not generalize to the whole state.
I honestly think the inverse of what you’re saying is true…Texas invested billions in the 2000s in transmission capacity between West Texas and where everyone lives in Central and East Texas, opening up West Texas to wind and solar development. Texas is now #1 in wind generating capacity and #2 in solar, after California.
All that mess that happened in 2021 was due to corruption within the Texas Railroad Commission, which had the power to force natural gas electric generating facilities to winterize but did not do so. When the temperature dropped to 4°, the natural gas plants froze and went offline almost all at once, causing an immediate drop in power supply necessitating severe and immediate power cuts statewide to protect the grid from failure. Circuits were reenergized slowly over the following few days, but it stayed really cold for really long. I had personally never been through weather even remotely like that in my 35 years in Texas.
All the other outages you’ve heard about in Texas were mechanical outages, localized areas where power lines were damaged by weather, like Austin in the '23 ice storm or Houston after Hurricane Beryl this past July. People on here generalize these to “Texas’s grid is failing again!”, but every state and every nation faces the same challenges with weather-related mechanical outages.
You’re both sorta wrong (and sorta right).
Texas’s grid is crap. It’s far too unregulated and operators do not focus on the right sorts of improvements that will enhance grid stability. Sure, production is great, which means prices are low, but when you ignore warning calls, you invite disaster. They knew, and they chose not to enforce regulations that other states enforce. Other states deal with far colder weather. This was a failure of regulation. And they also fail to maintain basic system design, so a normal power fault can grow out of control to take out power to most of west Texas.
Anyway - sorry. That’s just a pet annoyance of mine. I hate it when pro-corporate governmental policies are seen as a positive thing based on limited metrics. Lower rates amidst poorer performance is not what I’d consider a marker of success. People die, have their homes and property damaged, and lose a lot of money during power outages.
While the chronic underinvestment in their infrastructure is still an issue, the recently announced infrastructure investment is geared toward transmission and generation, which wouldn’t (directly) address their reliability woes.
It seems to me that the goal of this allocation is to build generation capacity in states with space for solar (and possibly wind, although the Biden admin isn’t trying to bootstrap the wind industry in the U.S.). And also build transmission capacity to get that power out of those states and into other areas of the country. (And possibly back in, should they face local problems.)
My hunch is that they want to get some of that renewable power out west, to have a backup the next time the Colorado river/areas that currently get power from the Hoover Dam suffer from a drought, and to feed power up to the east coast so they can decarbonize more easily.
Besides Texas, none of those states listed are population dense or otherwise rich. In fact the low population density may require the cost per subscriber to be significantly higher because more infrastructure is required to bring service to fewer people. This is a perfect example of good federal government spending.
Is your preference that if these regions can’t afford to build/maintain this infrastructure they should go without?
Not a swing state in that list. Don’t they know you only help those that get you elected??
It doesn’t really seem like a bailout.
The packaging says reliability, but the description within the article looks less like neighborhood reliability, and more like national grid reliability.
Specifically, those grid interconnections - the Cimarron Link, Southern Spirit, and Southline. Cimarron will connect Texas to massive wind farms in Oklahoma - power that isn’t going anywhere. It’ll connect Texas to Mississippi (Southern Spirit), and Texas to Tucson. I don’t know about the Mississippi connection, but Tucson is connected to Hoover Dam, which means that losses from transmission be damned, once this is all done, power from (at least) Oklahoma can be sent to LA the next time Lake Meade dries up, with the possibility of power from the east coast finding its way to the west, and vice versa.
As other commenters pointed out, Texas already has some of the least expensive energy in the country, so adding capacity doesn’t make a lot of sense. And transmission lines only adds reliability in the sense that there’s more supply, but most of their failures are not supply related. My understanding of the adding capacity part is just a dovetail into adding solar capacity to states with a lot of land that will become increasingly useless for farming as the climate changes. It just so happens that Biden is trying to create a U.S.-based solar panel and battery production industry. Not a bad strategy to throw cash into generating/subsidizing demand at the same time as we start adding tariffs to imports of those products. (It’s not like, a great strategy, either - because unless the U.S. is willing to subsidize their market longer than China is willing to subsidize theirs, then the U.S. will not really ever have a competitive industry, but I guess if they view it as a matter of national security, then it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t make sense.)
It’s infrastructure week!