For those of you who haven’t been
able to devote your life to following what’s happening in Texas in the wake of
the Valentine’s Week Storm (my name for it, although there hasn’t been a lot of
love lost so far), this article
from UtilityDive helps you update your scorecard. To summarize for you:
·
The star of the article
is Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who made a remarkable statement
last April in regards to Covid: “there are more important things than living
and that’s saving this country.” My guess is the 45,000 Texans who have died so
far in the pandemic might disagree with him, but they’re currently unable to
comment.
·
Not content to make
light of the lives of his fellow Texans, he followed up that statement with one
on Feb. 24 (on
Fox News), making light of their loss of life savings: “We have in Texas,
you can choose your energy plan and most people have a fixed rate. If they had
a fixed rate per kilowatt-hour, their rates aren’t going up…. But the people
who are getting those big bills are people who gambled on a very, very low
rate…going forward, people need to read the fine print in those kinds of
bills.”
·
My guess is that,
unlike with the first statement, Patrick got a lot more pushback from the second
one, because he seems to have experienced a remarkable (political deathbed?) conversion.
As the UtilityDive article recounts, in a couple of weeks he’s changed from
a cold-blooded defender of free markets into a wild-eyed consumer advocate, who’s
pressing the lone remaining member of the Texas PUC to retroactively change the
price of power during the week in question.
·
As the PUC member
points out (actually, I should call him “the PUC”, since he’s all that’s left
of it now), there’s only one problem with this request: there’s no legal basis
for it.
So that’s the current state of
this crisis: Texas is caught between an immovable object and an irresistible force.
The only outcome I can see is that ultimately the Texas citizens and ratepayers
will bear some of the (perfectly legal) costs, and those that have paid the
bills already will be only partially reimbursed, so they’ll share the costs as
well. Nobody will be happy, but hopefully that will provide some momentum to
fix the problems that led to this human and economic disaster.
Speaking of the economic problems,
if you found this
post interesting (or if you hated it and want to see me receive my comeuppance),
you might enjoy the Energy Central conversation
I’m having with Robert Borlick. He’s someone who obviously knows much more
about the Texas power market than I do, and he wrote in to correct me on a few
important points. I replied to him, and I’m hoping he’ll continue the
conversation (I’ve been posting almost all of my blog posts on Energy Central
since last August, and they’ve proven popular there, too. One difference with
EC is I get a lot more comments – including long ones like Robert’s – there than
I ever have on my blog. You can read me on either medium – I earn the same princely
sum either way. Anyone can read any EC article and its comments, but if you
want to comment on your own you have to be a member).
Any opinions expressed in this
blog post are strictly mine and are not necessarily shared by any of the
clients of Tom Alrich LLC. If you would like to comment on what you have read here, I would
love to hear from you. Please email me at tom@tomalrich.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment