There is at least one major way that government interference made this worse.
What portion of generation capacity investment do you think went toward wind and solar over the last decade?
I don't know the answer, but I know it's absurdly high, that the misallocation of resources was created by artificial government subsidies, and that those investments didn't help us here.
That is a newsworthy point to make.
If it wasn't so politically incorrect to talk about coal generation... Maybe the investment we've already made would have carried us through this crisis much more smoothly...
But think about it like this:
The crunch in energy prices was largely in natural gas (which is the primary backup to wind and solar). We can produce only so much gas per day, without time to build out more capacity (rework or drill wells). So, for the most part, in a short term crisis, we have a given amount of gas produced in the country.
When we hit record low temps across most of the country for an extended period...
We outran our ability to produce.
So, everyone in the country is now bidding on a limited supply of BTUs. As the price rises, we should naturally reduce our consumption, lessening the crisis.
People who were paying to run their outdoor sauna might turn it off. Great! There's gas saved to help keep grandma defrosted!
If someone is heating an uninsulated barn because they like to sit out there and paint watercolors, and they leave it running through this... they should pay $17k!
They denied that heating capacity to someone's grandma!
If they paid to heat the same barn, not for a frivolous reason, but, say they had $200k of seedlings that have to be kept warm, they still made an economic decision, and should be held to that.
I understand feeling blindsided by a dramatically higher electric or gas bill. That sucks, and it's not normally something we have to pay a whole lot of attention to.
But that's how a free market works, and I know the radio and television morons were actually warning people to reduce their consumption. They sometimes do spread important messages.
PS- I don't believe anyone with a reasonable sized home, running reasonable insulation, and keeping their thermostat set at a reasonable temp got a $17k bill.
It's just not believable (unless the billing is just wrong).
Something else is going on here. Grow op, something.
Take a look at that shithead fucking energy policy in CA. All thier infrastructure costs went into green policy.
They didn't give a F about maintaining the infrastructure they had. Now look at the place. They literally burned an entire city (Paradise, CA) to the ground two years ago because of a transformer problem .
There is at least one major way that government interference made this worse.
What portion of generation capacity investment do you think went toward wind and solar over the last decade?
I don't know the answer, but I know it's absurdly high, that the misallocation of resources was created by artificial government subsidies, and that those investments didn't help us here.
That is a newsworthy point to make.
If it wasn't so politically incorrect to talk about coal generation... Maybe the investment we've already made would have carried us through this crisis much more smoothly...
But think about it like this:
The crunch in energy prices was largely in natural gas (which is the primary backup to wind and solar). We can produce only so much gas per day, without time to build out more capacity (rework or drill wells). So, for the most part, in a short term crisis, we have a given amount of gas produced in the country.
When we hit record low temps across most of the country for an extended period...
We outran our ability to produce.
So, everyone in the country is now bidding on a limited supply of BTUs. As the price rises, we should naturally reduce our consumption, lessening the crisis.
People who were paying to run their outdoor sauna might turn it off. Great! There's gas saved to help keep grandma defrosted!
If someone is heating an uninsulated barn because they like to sit out there and paint watercolors, and they leave it running through this... they should pay $17k!
They denied that heating capacity to someone's grandma!
If they paid to heat the same barn, not for a frivolous reason, but, say they had $200k of seedlings that have to be kept warm, they still made an economic decision, and should be held to that.
I understand feeling blindsided by a dramatically higher electric or gas bill. That sucks, and it's not normally something we have to pay a whole lot of attention to.
But that's how a free market works, and I know the radio and television morons were actually warning people to reduce their consumption. They sometimes do spread important messages.
PS- I don't believe anyone with a reasonable sized home, running reasonable insulation, and keeping their thermostat set at a reasonable temp got a $17k bill.
It's just not believable (unless the billing is just wrong).
Something else is going on here. Grow op, something.
you're absolutely correct.
Take a look at that shithead fucking energy policy in CA. All thier infrastructure costs went into green policy.
They didn't give a F about maintaining the infrastructure they had. Now look at the place. They literally burned an entire city (Paradise, CA) to the ground two years ago because of a transformer problem .