Seems that everyone thinks they are guaranteed power, as much as they want with no limit ever. I don't think that a reasonable thing to assume. Business should be able to have a generator if they absolutely HAVE to have power all the time, bitcoin should be the first thing cut off.

UninformedInternetBlogger said:

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Seems that everyone thinks they are guaranteed power, as much as they want with no limit ever. I don't think that a reasonable thing to assume. Business should be able to have a generator if they absolutely HAVE to have power all the time, bitcoin should be the first thing cut off.

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The whole premise with the bitcoin miners is that they would utilize variable pricing. Basically suck up power when the price was near zero, and cut off when the price was high. As a business decision, they should be shutting themselves off when conditions get tight and price gets high. ERCOT or whoever shouldn't have to shut them off. Also shouldn't need to pay them to shut off.

I'm wondering if the changes made in response to '21 to cap the max wholesale price disincentivized the bitcoin miners who would be shutting down if the prices were higher. Or are they just taking advantage of a poorly thought out plan to pay large users to shed load. Certainly seems like we at least need more rules to that program so we aren't paying people extra to do what they would do anyway.

Samsung got stung bad in 21 when they lost power at their fab in Austin. They have taken steps to ensure that doesn't happen again including having sufficient generation capacity onsite to run the fab.

While ideally they would switch to self generation when the grid prices are higher than their costs to produce power, there are other complicating factors. I could see where additional payments to encourage them to voluntarily switch over might be beneficial to the grid. Although, you could also force a switch over by just telling them you are cutting their power.

Samsung is already set, but others may not be. Payments to voluntarily shed load could encourage other large loads to either have the flexibility to shut down or build the self generation capacity to go off the grid when called upon.

An article from the Texas Tribune out yesterday has updated battery storage numbers for ERCOT. They are now reporting 7,500 - 10,000MW will be available for 2024 and bigger numbers projected through 2028.

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/12/texas-power-grid-batteries/

Will be.

Bump this when we get to "are available".

I have been approached by a businessman in this space and he asked me to research, which I am doing. No policy positions identified at this time.

Respectfully,

-yancy

PS- sorry just saw this post

Stucco said:

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CSU isn't buying the power for .14. A good third of that rate goes to the city general fund. We need electric deregulation.

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As a new resident to College Station area, I was amazed that I didn't have deregulated power. We had Energy Ogre back in Cypress and to break the contract with them I had to prove we were moving to an unregulated market. Prices here are way higher than in NW Houston.

My mom uses Energy Ogre in Missouri City.

Hornbeck said:

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With all the almost daily pleas from ERCOT for us residential customers to conserve electricity, I got to thinking about solar power once again, and how it makes no sense financially to install. A good number of people bought solar when the IRS would give you a sizeable tax break, but still, it would be thousands to install, and it didn't make much sense to me then, and with all these cries to conserve, I guess I'm confused as to why ERCOT and local utilities make it an unwise investment to install solar, from my vantage point.

I used this example. I'm a CSU customer, and I pay roughly $0.14 / kWh. Now, if I spent tens of thousands of dollars, and generated my own power, enough to feed back into the grid, CSU only buys from me at $0.04 / kWh. It costs them nothing to generate this power, so if ERCOT and CSU really wanted a sustainable grid, they'd buy back at what I buy for, or at least a better rate than at a 66% discount.

Curious to see what @Bob Yancy thinks about this.

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Why would they pay you more than they would pay other suppliers?

Why should they pay me less than spot prices versus their "wholesale rate"?

I've seen several de-regulated plans that do exactly that…

Here are some factors that play into this, your power is worth less to the utility because:

The utility doesn't control it or know when it will be producing and when it won't.

You are producing a tiny amount of power, utilities deal in megawatts, a kilowatt here or there is more of a nuisance.

The utility may be able to produce/buy its own power cheaper than you can.

Because they can, they built the lines, transformers, substations and generators.

Maybe they should just not buy the power from customers