It’s funny that you would immediately assume that the house is no longer standing. You’re correct, of course. It wasn’t replaced with a mcmansion but with a series of dull row houses.
There was a weird car dealer at the end of the block who was the final holdout the last time I checked.
The car dealer is still there, happily, as is a repair shop at the other end of the block that I’d forgotten about. I say happily because I know they annoy the shit out of the idiots who live up and down the street. The townhouses on the east side of Vernon were there when we lived there and we most definitely annoyed the shit out of whoever was living in them at the time. Now that I’m thinking about it I recall that the tenants who preceded us were a group of gay guys in AA who were heavily involved in musical theater and drag performances. I wonder if we, a couple of long haired band dudes who rocketed around town in a 1970 Dodge Tradesman van (the extended model of course) were more or less annoying to the neighbors than the gay AA guys.
I’m really struggling to sift through all the narratives people are throwing out there. Some narratives seem to be aimed for lawsuits and others for politics. For example, this quote from the article:
“The pricing increase was to ensure regional utilities were cutting the amount of power ERCOT ordered in its Feb. 15 Level 3 Energy Emergency Alert, which resulted in 4.1 million Texans losing power.”
Is an effort to curb demand really the reason for the price increase? I thought mandated blackouts were the mechanism to “cut the amount of power ERCOT ordered.” I just thought the price increase was the cost of energy at that moment in a deregulated system.
Instead of this system failure being a case study in the failure of libertarianism, these muddled narratives will ensure that nothing gets done to address the system failure and also ensure we have another future transfer of wealth from the public to select companies.
There’s a reason why, in the one year of a worldwide pandemic that has caused Great Depression-level unemployment and World War-level fatalities, the 664 U.S. billionaires have increased their net worth by $1.3 trillion…with a “tuh”.
Yeah, that was sort of my impression as well. I thought the PUC approved the price increase concept as a way to incentivize generators to increase supply.
I thought it was to arbitrarily reduce demand to levels that the limited supply could meet. I don’t think ERCOT “ordered” any power, that all they did was provide estimates to producers as the the amount of power that was expected to be needed. Contractual suppliers provided power to the consumers, and acted as middle men between producers and consumers.
Yep. Like surge pricing on Uber. It’s hard to see how increasing prices - without end consumers knowing in real time - is going to curb demand in the short term.
Of course, it’s a stupid concept anyway, because it’s not like someone had generators sitting idle waiting for the price to hit $10 / kWh before cranking up those babies.
ERCOT is essentially a trade association, not a regulatory agency. They can mandate all they want, but they have no enforcement authority. Spiking the price was one way to stop the retail providers from continuing to purchase more power and continuing to provide service to their customers. It was more or less the nuclear option for ERCOT.
It wasn’t to curb demand at the consumer level, it was to price the retailers out of business. It was intended to at least temporarily force them to cease operating and providing their services.
To use your Uber analogy, it was like immediately raising the price of gasoline to $100,000/gallon. It doesn’t mean riders don’t want to get from point A to point B, it means that drivers cannot afford to fill their tanks to offer a ride in the first place.
Well, it goes back to our* fundamental philosophy on electricity. It’s a luxury item to provided by the private market, not a necessity or a utility of public need. We get that you want power, but you don’t really need it. They didn’t have power at the Alamo.
*ours in the collective sense of those who think they’re tough as nails pioneers, blazing a daily trail across the wilderness, in defiance of tyranny “back east”.