Brent Bennett

@RocCityBuilt @TheFrackingGuy @clawrence Also, most of these large facilities are bringing their own power because they are not counting on the grid for full reliability and because the #txlege required them to curtail during emergencies, which many of them don't want to do. Not a sign of a reliable grid.

That is just a political rant, not an actual analysis. And it is belied by all the entities building there such as Tesla Giga Factory, data centers and huge semiconductor fabs. They are investing billions there and it would be at risk if power was unreliable. I think I’ll take their decision making over someone’s politicized rants.

They just keep walking further and further into the trap of their own construction

@RocCityBuilt @TheFrackingGuy @clawrence FWIW, I think ERCOT's reliability assessment next year is going to support our assessment that the winter problem is far from solved in Texas.

@TheFrackingGuy @forrest_f_ @mitchrolling @rk__upadhya @xiaowang1984 @TermPowerTrader The solution is not a capacity market, which is just customers subsidizing backup power (throw $$$ at the problem). The solution, as @TheFrackingGuy says, is to either require wind and solar to pay for their capacity deficit or pay them a lower energy price to compensate.

Yeah there needs to be money for reliability. @drbennettTX is working on a firming requirement for wind and solar so they need to have or contract with firm suppliers to participate. Otherwise get a capacity market, but that’ll be expensive because new wind and solar will soak most of the energy market revenue and gas plants will make their money in the capacity market.

If you needed another reason to support ending wind and solar subsidies, here's a friendly reminder that an over-reliance on wind/solar resources were to blame for the 2021 Texas blackouts. And the wind/solar bros are so close to admitting it. To recap: 1) The blackouts stemmed from 20 years of poor planning, as ERCOT relied on only wind and solar to meet growing demand since 2000. 2) As Brent Bennett at @TPPF noted, even if no thermal outages occurred, rolling blackouts were inevitable during the storm because TX simply didn't have enough capacity. 3) Despite building 40+ GW of wind and solar by 2021, this still wasn't enough to keep the lights on in ERCOT. 4) TX would've fared better by investing in reliable, thermal resources, but subsidies incentivized poor planning decisions. 5) Wind and solar resources at one point produced at a combined 1.5% capacity factor during the blackout, leaving thermal resources to cover over 98% of the load in that hour. 6) Thermal resources provided over 90% of the total load during the worst of the blackouts. 7) ERCOTs dispatchable reserve margin in ERCOT is now basically completely diminished, setting up for another disaster in the future. Capacity doesn't mean anything if it's unable to produce electricity. Subsidies had a major role in this disaster.

@TheFrackingGuy @forrest_f_ @mitchrolling @rk__upadhya @xiaowang1984 @TermPowerTrader The problem is that ERCOT energy market pays the same clearing price to wind and solar and it does to thermal. No treatment of the different capacity and operating characteristics. It's as if we internalized Lazard's LCOE formulas into our market design, with all their flaws.

@TheFrackingGuy @DavidBakhtiari That's correct @TheFrackingGuy. And term limits make staffers and bureaucrats more powerful than legislators. The support for term limits is well-intentioned, but the empirical evidence is that they do more harm than good. Just look at California.

@DavidBakhtiari Term limits sound great in theory, but that also produces members who don't have time to develop deep knowledge on the subject matter. This empowers the lobbyists even more because the elected officials simply don't have the background to call BS when they need to.

Just curious, do people WANT or DO NOT WANT term limits in Congress?

First week of work at the Texas Public Policy Foundation! Ready to make some great things happen. @TPPF #myfirstTweet