The operators of the Texas power grid overcharged wholesale electricity customers by $16 billion due to a pricing error during the weather emergency last month that triggered extended blackouts and left more than 4 million Texans shivering amid subfreezing temperatures, a monitor reports.

Potomac Economics, a Virginia-based firm that's paid to provide an arm's-length assessment of the Texas grid, is recommending that the overcharges — billed to retail electric providers and others — be reversed.

The overcharges occurred because the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which oversees the grid and is commonly known as ERCOT, left wholesale prices at the maximum level allowable — $9,000 per megawatt hour — for about a day and a half too long during the emergency, Potomac said in a letter to state regulators Thursday.

The overcharges represent only a part of the costs racked up during the calamity by generators, distributors and retailers of electricity, however.

According to Potomac, real-time market costs on the Texas grid totaled about $47 billion from Feb. 14-19 because of the power outages and sky-high wholesale prices — compared with about $10 billion in real-time market costs for all of 2020.

-snip-

https://www.statesman.com/story/business/2021/03/04/ercot-pricing-error-spurred-16-b-grid-overcharges-monitor-says/4582419001/

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I’d like to see the results from another audit. The whole situation makes me livid.

PUCT wiped out the pricing thresholds on the coldest morning, so previously there was no pricing basis for customers to anticipate such sky high rates.* It was ERCOT’s job to logically start sharing the grid ahead of the emergency mode that left substantial markets unable to roll power.

If everybody had to go dark for thirty minutes starting Sunday during the day, then requests to conserve might have been taken more seriously and maybe we wouldn’t have reached life or death pricing to turn up more power.

Everyday customers shouldn’t be expected to cover the costs of criminally negligent energy companies after they caused a preventable disaster.

*http://www.puc.texas.gov/agency/resources/pubs/news/2021/PUCTX-REL-COLD21-021521-EMERGorder-FIN.pdf

Who uses it to level an acre of an octogenarian’s tree farm he bought with funds from the GI bill because, as a spoiled brat, you have connections to a title company that gives you title to an improperly documented right-of-way on your deed. Then, annoy your abused neighbor with an inexplicable inability to use a dang gate to the point they’re looking at relinquishing acreage in a settlement to get them the hell of the property forever in the legal desert that is east Texas.

That’s another way.

So, iow, abbott was on fox selling a fraud because he’s aggressively stupid and cruel.

His gas producer buddies were making so much money pumping LNG to export, etc. at the same time operations were falling that Texas power plants weren’t willing to pay the price to crank more electricity, until the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) lifted pricing caps and floors on MONDAY. I bet this was all foreseeable in scenario planning, and abbot with his appointees at PUCT (who oversee ERCOT) waited based on the profitability of the dire situation.

He’s using the natural disaster to further harm and scare people about wind rather than seeking to bolster the infrastructure of all sources of electricity in Texas, because he’s an awful person.

https://twitter.com/ERCOT_ISO/status/1361215084010352644?s=20

Are asking Texans to:
- reduce their thermostat to 68° or below
- unplug unnecessary appliances
- turnoff unneeded lights
- don’t run major appliances like dishwashers and dryers

Think expanded, 15 page greeting card with recipes at the back. It’s not a manifesto, no, it’s a freakin’ timesaver. Is to take back the time that republican politicians and rw media are stealing from me. Time is money and they are picking my pockets and needlessly wasting lives.

It would be a full time job if I spent five hours explaining how it is that I’m not a communist, why racism is immoral and stupid, and generally what’s been happening in my life during the missing COVID year. Feel I should remind some folks how Pa was a proud Democrat and a diabetic who made an excellent, zero-carb red eye gravy.

It’s for some family members who might believe that their first cousin narrowly survived COVID due to the grace of their God and not the ventilators and healthcare workers.

It’s for the acquaintances that I’ll likely run into again, who, without semi-regular exposure to a librul like me must think I spend my time mumbling the orange guy’s name while eating avocado toast, and mailing illegal ballots.

It’s to get rid of some of the shadows on the cave wall. And to make sure that if they continue to follow the fascists that they get real specific in who it is they’re hating. Is just to make sure they despise those liberals making gravy with venison breakfast sausage drippings, strong black coffee, Tabasco, salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper.

I put that on my biscuits, y’all — and they can’t stop me.

We can all see the ruse taking place in the Senate today. Now is the time to let your Senators know you are watching and want them to convict tRump:

All the numbers can be found here: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100215099395

Anybody else getting this? Has been saying they’ll return for the last couple hours at least.



Am wondering how many/which markets are effected?