This 3/18 article caught the PUC chair, who subsequently resigned on pressure from the governor, privately boasting to "investors" that CPS Energy has really big gas bills, a "fairly large" emergency electric bill here said to be $300 million, but lots of money to pay. It also mentions how ERCOT claims they kept the electricity price at the maximum rate about 300 times the normal rate for 2 days after most power had been restored on Wednesday 2/17 because they wanted to prevent "loss of life." Still no discussion of the even higher CPS natural gas bill which other articles say could be $850 million. CPS had to buy natural gas at emergency rates to keep electrical generators running when instruments at the coal and nuclear plants froze up.
I got my CPS energy bill for the period starting 2/16 and it is very low...no additional charges--and I used less electricity than usual. CPS has borrowed extra money ($500 million) to prevent passing on large bills to ratepayers in the short term. However, because CPS owned by the City--aka "us"--unless the bills are reduced by the State or Courts, we will eventually pay them off over many years. $1 billion in storm charges for CPS as a whole would mean about $1000 liability per ratepayer, not as bad as some in Texas face (elsewhere bills have been up to $16,000 for a small home) but still not good.
The best solution to prevent these kinds of problems in future--emergency gouging by Texas Electricity generators--would be to give up the insane and corrupt idea of a Texas State Electricity Grid and connect Texas to the Eastern and Western US Grids (like El Paso, which did not lose power). Texas generators would then also have to meet federal standards. This idea is almost never talked about, but one poll says 57% of Texans would go for it. Governor Abbot has said Texans would rather freeze to death and pay super high rates than accept federal regulation. I beg to differ.
No comments:
Post a Comment