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whatever1 parent
And tax payers pay for their F ups and then some additional bonuses to the gas traders of BP when Texas freezes.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/bp-emerge...

bz_bz_bz
Aside from shutting down some compressor stations that gas companies failed to properly register as essential equipment, ERCOT had almost nothing to do with NG prices.

Gas and power are intertwined but still very separate markets.

Natural gas would have gone even higher had ERCOT not shed load, so if you want to make reductionist statements about complex issues, you could say that ERCOT actually took away from the bonuses of BP gas traders who were long.

whatever1 OP
They did not do their job to regulate the market. Set aside their failure to check for winterization and the complete failure of demand forecasting or execution of rolling blackouts (that ended up being uncontrolled week long power losses that literally killed people).

They had almost uncapped max wholesale prices for energy during the blackouts. At some point it had reached 10k per megawatthour! Of course companies went bankrupt, and of course BP traders held bonus parties. The taxpayers apart from these they also had to bail out the bankrupt retailers.

bz_bz_bz
You haven't explained what any of that has to do with gas trading profits. HSC didn't go to $400/MMBtu because of ERCOT.
whatever1 OP
If I was one of the last standing gas fueled energy producer / gas distributor with an energy price of $9k/MWhr I would take any gas price to ensure that I have the last available drop of gas.

The sky high energy price and the collapse of gas supply were the fundamental price drivers. The alternative scenario is that the gas market players were just price gouging. Pick what you want.

bz_bz_bz
> I would take any gas price to ensure that I have the last available drop of gas.

This is true of any ISO in the country during extreme conditions and you wouldn’t want it to not be.

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postpawl
You're technically right about ERCOT's limited role in gas pricing and the regulatory distinctions. But ERCOT did have some direct failures beyond just being a scapegoat, like ignoring federal winterization warnings, the $16 billion overcharging scandal where they kept prices at maximum for two days after outages mostly ended, and poor crisis communication. Even if PUCT and the Railroad Commission should have mandated better reserves and winterization, ERCOT still mismanaged what was within their control.
bz_bz_bz
I never said ERCOT did not have failures. I'm in the industry and have been massively critical of ERCOT for caving to politics rather than following market rules when they arbitrarily decided to keep the market at the cap. PUCT actually had final say on repricing those hours and chose not to.

ERCOT also didn't have the authority to implement winterization recommendations from the 2011 report outside of the already existing NERC standards. You can blame the PUCT for that or blame FERC for not actually updating those standards until 2023.

However, you still seem to have missed (and demonstrated) my point by referencing Energy Transfer -- they are a midstream company who made 99% of their profits off of NG not power. Conflating their profit with ERCOT's power prices is the problem. People refuse to educate themselves on the difference between gas and power markets, so the TRC and its massively influential O&G lobbyists have made zero changes to the intrastate gas network since the winter storm. Why? Because every layman who has read a few articles and thinks they're an expert is solely focused on ERCOT.

postpawl
I'm not sure why you're focusing on PUCT having “final say”. This Texas Tribune article shows ERCOT kept market prices too high for nearly two days after outages ended when their own market monitor said they should have reset prices the following day. It was clearly within ERCOT's control to fix.

https://www.texastribune.org/2021/03/04/ercot-texas-electric...

bz_bz_bz
You keep editing your responses heavily, so it's hard for me to respond correctly. I assume the changes to your post mean that you have found this article: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/03/05/texas-ercot-electric...

I'm not sure how you decided what I'm "focused" on. Read the first two sentences of my previous post again.

sidewndr46
The entire point of Texas having it's own grid is to ignore Federal guidance. If we were going to follow it, we'd just add more areas of the state to the east & west grids. Which Texas is already connected to, just in limited areas.
WaxProlix
That's largely true, but on the flipside at least some of the rush of batteries into Texas to do ancillary services and provide redundancy are a result of greedy capitalists seeing the profits a few hundred MWh can get you in Texas (at taxpayer expense!) and rushing in to get a piece of the pie. So, markets!
bee_rider
Wait, how does it work? If the government is using taxpayer money to buy services… that’s not really a free market solution in the conventional sense, right?

Of course if we have to pretend it is to get Texas to do it… fine I guess.

WaxProlix
Na, the utility payers actually pay it, though taxpayers pay for some of the infrastructure and administration, and given to some service providers in the form of tax breaks I think. The circles of that venn diagram are close to an overlap though.

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