good thing it never gets too hot or too cold in Texas
I would never live in Texas but if I did I would have like 20kW of batteries on the wall of my McMansion's garage and a generator, they would pay for themselves within a couple years of this bullshit
the inevitable end for those with the wealth to survive the mortgaging of our utilities. you will have to have water treatment too because the water from your municipality or well will not be safe
That is the solution most people go for. Rather than get mad and demand power be a public utility, rugged individualism prevails, everyone who can buys a generator, and the poor get shamed for being idiots for not buying one and deserving to suffer for their mistake. I'm still a bit bitter arguing with people that the government should do basic infrastructure spending on the power grid and being told instead everyone should only look out for themselves. I'm glad I moved out.
Idk about texas but there's lots of places in amerika where it's illegal to be off grid, or have your own power generation.
laaaaand of the freeeeeee 
Very uncommon Texas W I guess because you can get generators at the hardware store here
Probably after a single price surge, even
fascinating to me that texans can be bled like this in the heat and their minds don't turn to murder
all those guns to protect themselves from "criminals" and they're too 
-brained to realize that the real criminals robbing them are at the power company
They do but not the people responsible.
right? like a texan chud is ready to shoot somebody for driving too slow, but when a company is forcing them to pay absurd costs or sweat their balls off...
they can't countenance the idea of taking revenge
If it weren't for all those immigrants hogging the air conditioning! - texas
One megawatt can usually power about 800 homes on a normal day but as little as 200 homes on a hot day in Texas.
texas delenda est
You see, this is why solar power can never work. What happens when then sun is up, and—
You have no idea how many times I’ve said this to actual texans
Natural monopolies and all. Gotta shove a market everywhere, even where it makes no sense.
God if only we could harness the power of the sun to power devices that COOL our homes… somebody please get working on a way to make this happen
if someone were so authoritarian that they'd disrupt the free market in this way, President Biden would simply have no choice but to impose tariffs on them to protect American business from such dangerous foreign technology
Maybe the real red sun in the sky was the friends we made along the way
I hate talking about solar here because you hear the dumbest fucking arguments against it that it makes me want to get violent.
It can’t support all our energy needs? It’s better than using 100% fossil fuels though you have to start somewhere.
What about when the suns not out? BITCH ITS FUCKING TEXAS
I love free market basic utilities because of the informed choice you have as a consumer to choose to use it when you hear about price changes before you're charged
I hate it here. Texas is a hellhole. There are zero redeeming qualities about living in this state. It's too hot, the environment is ugly and barren, every city is a concrete jungle, flat and full of parking lots and nothing else.
If my power goes out at the peak of the heat, I guess I'm killing an ercot exec?
every city is a concrete jungle, flat and full of parking lots and nothing else
I visited Dallas once. Stayed in a hotel for a weekend-long event. Wanted to go get food. "Hey, I can see stuff right across the street, let's walk." The street is a fucking massive highway with no crossings unless you walk like a mile in either direction to get to an intersection and then a mile back to get to the food. Repeat to get back to the hotel.
I had the exact same experience in Dallas. Do we work for the same company or is that just how Dallas is everywhere.
That's just metropolitan Texas. Houston is just as bad if not worse. Austin is a lot better though but only because the bar is pretty low.
Having power go out during peak summer never used to happen. Texas sucks ass, but genuinely we produce enough energy that we often sell it to the other energy grids from what I understand. We shouldn’t really have any brown/blackouts at all other than the freezes.
The cost being measured in MWh - does that mean that this is the production cost, and that the KWh rate that people are paying is even higher?
This is $.688 per KWh, which is high, but like only about 4 times the cost of my regular priced electricity in my region.
Does this jumping 1600% mean that normally electricity is less than $.04 per KWh. That is incredibly low! There's no way that what people pay for electricity in Texas. This must be production costs, right?
it's wholesale costs, not costs of production, there's at least one more layer of middlemen in there before the consumer gets anything. Avg residential rate is 14.3 cents/kWh (but businesses only pay 8.7)
I can only imagine the average Texan billiard ball brain take:
: blame capitalism
: blame being woke
"So much for climate change!"
Freedom isn't free honey.
look kiddo battery tech and national grids are nice but have you thought about shareholders?
Oh I've thought about them alright 
Who could have predicted this once in a lifetime event
Welcome to c/news! Please read the Hexbear Code of Conduct and remember... we're all comrades here.
Rules:
-- PLEASE KEEP POST TITLES INFORMATIVE --
-- Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed. --
-- All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. --
-- If you are citing a twitter post as news please include not just the twitter.com in your links but also nitter.net (or another Nitter instance). There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ or archive them as you would any other reactionary source using e.g. https://archive.today . Twitter screenshots still need to be sourced or they will be removed --
-- Mass tagging comm moderators across multiple posts like a broken markov chain bot will result in a comm ban--
-- Repeated consecutive posting of reactionary sources, fake news, misleading / outdated news, false alarms over ghoul deaths, and/or shitposts will result in a comm ban.--
-- Neglecting to use content warnings or NSFW when dealing with disturbing content will be removed until in compliance. Users who are consecutively reported due to failing to use content warnings or NSFW tags when commenting on or posting disturbing content will result in the user being banned. --
-- Using April 1st as an excuse to post fake headlines, like the resurrection of Kissinger while he is still fortunately dead, will result in the poster being thrown in the gamer gulag and be sentenced to play and beat trashy mobile games like 'Raid: Shadow Legends' in order to be rehabilitated back into general society. --