Lazy8 wrote:
 

Point of order: California's regulatory structure is the talking heads' Poster Child for Whatever is Needing an Example.

 westslope wrote:
 
Generally agree, but there have to be exceptions for decency and humanitarian reasons.  You shouldn't have to pay a tax because you needed surgery after being hit by a car.  There is no need for the government to benefit from your death...so your funeral shouldn't really be taxed (not taxing the estate, yet collecting $120 on the casket...?).  Medicines, sanitary products, personal hygiene... is the tax really going to make a difference?

We currently have over 18,000 individual taxing jurisdictions in the US.  It's a disaster.  One, standard VAT would make a ton of sense and save billions in compliance and collection costs...but where would those people work?  I don't much care where they work, but as a friend of mine used to say, "turkeys don't vote for Christmas".   It's hard for politicians to stand up to crazy...who is going to look thousands of people in the eye and say "I know this is going to be difficult, but it's for the good of the country....good luck finding a job".

The US needs an intelligent and fair re-design for all taxation.   We have the technology to build compliance into the system but lack the leadership.

Since global warming is an existential threat, make gasoline $10/gallon and public transportation almost free.  Give away guns...but tax ammunition at $5 per bullet.  There is a lot we could do and should do...but we can't agree if our President has the first amendment right to send his hoarde to the capital to stop democracy by killing police officers....we're going to agree on taxation?

Final thought:  If you add VAT to EVERYTHING...then you have to increase wages...it's almost a zero-sum game but has friction costs that reduce the value of the implementation.  Smart policy is better than strict implementation.

islander wrote:

It takes money people are willing to spend, at least when they have it, and once they realize the value of having reliable power. As your business model demonstrates.

Texas' grid failed for technological reasons, and putting Bernie Sanders in charge wouldn't have prevented valves from freezing or power lines from snapping. Tying into a larger grid would help some, but Texas' grid is so large that the widespread failures at the local level would have still caused outages, and would have likely caused shortages in neighboring areas.

Heavily (ridiculously? absurdly?) regulated states have power problems all the time. As you move into residential power systems you'll find a lot of customers in California, the anti-Texas. I still have a lot of friends there and a topic that comes up on our weekly beer-and-Zoom call is the power situation—most of these folks have grid-tied residential PV systems, some with with battery backups—because the utility power is so unreliable. They aren't freezing to death because it's southern California and it isn't their turn for anomalous weather, but it's a problem they deal with constantly. People without the means to pay for that kind of infrastructure just have to cope, and if the freak winter weather had hit them instead of Texas—probably with identical outcomes—I doubt any talking heads would be blaming their regulatory structure.

 kurtster wrote:
 

1.  I did not view the world in that way.   Too Dark Ages for me.    You are caught in a vortex of Evil versus Good.  I am not.

2.  Some taxes should be designed to discourage behaviour.  Yes, absolutely.  

3.  Yes, I would tax tampons. Along with groceries and books.   I would apply a value-added sales tax on everything.   No exceptions.  

The USA should have done this in the last century.   

 Lazy8 wrote:
 
But to do this it takes a lot of money, and one way to do it is to connect to other grids - which requires complying with regulation. Texans wanted cheap energy and they are fond of no regulations, so they didn't connect to other grids, and they didn't spend the money (to keep energy cheap) to add additional distributed capacity. 

So to point this back to the topic, Texas built a system that fit their ideology and demand for cheap energy. It couldn't respond to an unusual event, because that didn't fit the supply/demand equation they had, so it failed when the unusual condition came along. It's not really surprising, but now that people have died it gets a lot of attention. It's also a bit glaring to have the 'independent/go it alone' rugged Texans calling for help and assistance, when they are famously unwilling to lend a hand to others when there is need.  So capitalism and consumerism (and ideology) led us here. Now what?  Will they comply with regulations that would allow them to interconnect? Will they build more capacity?  Will their public utility commission actually do something proactive instead of reactive?  Or will everyone forget this once spring rolls around and we have another thing to be aghast at?

I do find it funny that Ford is making a big deal about their trucks with onboard generators helping out in the crisis. This is a perfect example of how small distributed alternative sources could be used to improve the grid. This could just as easily be done with Many Toyota and Hondas, and Tesla / Nissan charging infrastructure could easily be configured to be a source instead of a load.

 haresfur wrote: 
 Agreed. On both counts.

 kurtster wrote:
 
Can't speak for westslope but I'd say tampons.

But taxing products to cover costs incurred by others isn't punative

 westslope wrote: 
Is there anything you will not tax or not want taxed ? 

A serious question as you seem to want to tax behaviour for punitive reasons.

NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote:

This discussion wound up in this thread because it's fashionable to blame the Texas grid's collapse on capitalism (because everything is capitalism's fault, and if you can mumble the magical incantation "deregulation" you get bonus anti-capitalism points) so why not?

The grid's purpose is to distribute power from where it's made to where it's needed. Renewables—at least distributed renewables—aren't a particular problem for grid stability precisely because they're distributed. Grid stability breaks down when big changes happen all of a sudden, like a critical line or a point source going down. When a small draw turns into a small supply that's still a small change, even if it happens quickly.

To harden a grid against disruption you need sources you can ramp up and down quickly, but you need distributed sources. That way you can lose large parts of the grid but keep it online.

 rhahl wrote:
 
Good piece.  To nuance,  aggregate demand for electricity is price inelastic.   Consumers still respond to price incentives.

In fact, regulators should really add excise taxes to electricity because not all the social and environmental costs are covered by market-determined prices.  

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote:
 

James is the son of John Kenneth Galbraith.   

I met senior Galbraith once when I was a graduate student/peace and disarmament researcher and active in the movement.

 rhahl wrote: 
  didn't know he was still alive. 

The problem is that electricity demand is inelastic: it doesn’t respond much to price, but it does respond to weather. In times of extreme heat or cold, demand becomes even more inelastic. And, unlike in an ordinary market, supply must equal demand every minute of every day. If it doesn’t, the entire system can fail...

...The new system did work most of the time. Prices rose and fell. Customers who didn’t sign long-term contracts faced some risk. One provider, called Griddy, had a special model: for a $9.99 monthly membership fee, you could get your power at the wholesale price. Most of the time, that was cheap.

But people don’t need electricity “most of the time”; they need it all the time. And, at least by 2011, when Texas experienced a short, severe freeze, the state’s leaders knew that the system was radically unstable in extreme weather. The system’s architects knew it as well, whatever they say now.

 Lazy8 wrote: 
Not quite sure why this topic has ended up in this thread but isn't the critical technical issue with renewables keeping grid stability? Remote, independent generation is all well and good but if you want an interregional grid to function, you need a stable source of power to cover your base load with enough resources available to come quickly online to handle peaks (at least as I understand it - total non-techie here). 
Just one more reason as I see it to invest in 4-gen nuclear.
My wife is in the German Green party, so we are at loggerheads on this, but even in her party they are worried about grid stability now that renewables account for so much of the nation's generating capacity and both coal and nuclear are getting phased out.

Red_Dragon wrote:

Utilities are poorly equipped to do this, and there are numerous more-agile (and more innovative) players taking on this role. If your expertise is connecting power suppliers to users stick to that. There is nothing inherently wrong with that as a practice or a business model.

After all, a grid is  nothing but a way for those with surplus power to share it with those without enough. The fact (and it is a fact) that maintaining that grid takes labor, materials, land, and energy means it has to be paid for. It's worth having and it's worth paying for.

If you don't want to share power with your neighbors then reconcile yourself to occasionally shivvering in the dark or having your generation system sit there idle when your battery is charged but the sun is shining.

 islander wrote: 
yes solar capture/storage has come a long and it is getting better

it's also good at rural/isolated and ancillary applications (cost and speed)

key major infrastructure needs reliability and density

small modular reactors should be the base/core energy supply

smart nuclear is safe and extremely green too

i see space for both in the solution

re-centering edit: we need capital and markets to help with innovation and production

 Red_Dragon wrote:
 

This is the right way. We do marine stuff now, but are branching out into off-grid. We are looking at grid tie, but regulation in the US is really difficult and is structured to make it hard for small guys and always favors the big providers - I bet you know a thing or two about this.  Our neighbors to the south are generally much better (probably partly because their grids are pretty spotty to begin with).  I'm pitching several small installs of self generation systems (solar w/ battery storage). Basically size the units for close to peak load. Then you can store surplus most of the day, you can use your own solar power to crank the AC in the afternoon for free, and then use the excess at night. If you run low or don't produce enough to cover peak, you can use the grid power everything.  Most places down south(of the boarder) will let you return excess to the grid as well. You spin the meter backwards and get a credit, they don't have to have as much supply when your neighbor kicks on the coffee pot in the morning. It's a win/win.   

We are a Victron dealer now, and they have some really cool stuff. They do end to end systems (at least in places where they can import solar panels), and have a really nice ability to build from 2KW up to 60KW three phase, self consumption, grid tie, all kinds of options for putting it together.  And then you can go online and monitor it from wherever you are:  https://vrm.victronenergy.com/...

kurtster,

Cheap energy is a delusion.  

Instead of paying now, you pay with greater macroeconomic instability, poor health outcomes and dead Americans.  ~70 dead Texans and still rising. 

Given all the American citizens that have built homes in flood plains and exposed coastal littoral zones, do you support climate change denial kurtster?   Of course you do.  It might be an effective tool for population control kurtster, so I can see some of the advantages to climate change denial.

 Red_Dragon wrote:
 
Bill Gates is on it.  First he has to get everyone vaccinated so he can track us...

</sarcasm...about the vaccines, not his new reactors>

 islander wrote: