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.
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.
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.
This is pretty good article about how and why.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We had rolling blackouts for a few hours. Nothing that remotely resembled the state of failure in 2021 where 90% of Texas lost power for several days.
However it was a very clear indication that we had a problem that obviously was never resolved.
That storm was completely crazy though. I don’t think Texas has EVER experienced anything like it before.
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.
It’s less about the right people getting hurt, and more about the right people making bank (e.g. themselves).
Texans must love the abuse, they keep voting for it.
It’s not that they love it. They’re just so dumb they’ll be convinced it was the fault of the gays and/or trans people.
I just moved out of that state.
Are you sure its not just Gerrymandering and laws that make it harder for votes to actually matter?
From what I’ve heard is that there’s a large majority stuck in Texas who disagree with the decisions of their government but are too poor to leave the state.
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.
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.
They can’t be bargained with. They can’t be reasoned with. They don’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until we are dead.
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!
