Aftermath of Texas ice storm/blackouts
12Have you ever had issues with your public utility?
Hurricane Harvey did $125 Billion damage. But the February ice event in Texas did $200 Billion!
There is now movement to make the utilities pay for the damage caused by the blackouts, through law suits. Can they still hide through the “Act of God” defense?
https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2021/may/after-the-fatal-winter-storm-this-law-firm-wants-to-hold-the-utilities-accountable/
This has the potential to set precedents nationally.
Two side notes:
Many of the power companies will likely be bailed out by acts of the Texas legislature, but paid for by their customers, as usual. The alternative is that many of the smaller private utilities go out of business, again hurting consumers. This was due to the shortages of fuel and supply-and-demand prices for what was available.
Much of Texas is currently under flash flood advisories from now through the weekend. Heavy and constant rain is expected many of these days, on top of already saturated grounds.
- 3 comments, 19 replies
- Comment
Yeah. Fun fun fun.
I would like to see all the legislators that voted for our promoted the current unregulated/unweatherized state energy system, and the lobbyists who pushed for it, and the larger corps who wanted it, be forced to pay.
I wonder who will pay damages for the deaths due to accidental carbon monoxide poisoning, or due to exposure to extended very low temps (often indoor temps), or to fires, or to other causes related to stupid but short-term-profitable-for-fhe-industry regulatory policies?
I would love to see the truly guilty parties be forced to pay personally for those; as well as for the personal and business losses and expenses.
/giphy unlikely
@f00l We’ll see. I don’t think the average Texas juror would sympathize with the utilities on this, if it were to make it to a jury trial. As the article pointed out, there was plenty of both historical evidence and sufficient advance warning for what was going to happen, and some relatively small and cheap steps could have averted a lot of the damage – and human cost.
As far as the bigger picture on the whole “winterization” of the power grid, IMHO that issue will not soon fade away – Texans have long memories when it comes to grudges. It will take not just a lot of capital expenditure but much better organization. And I think there is now an appetite for both of those.
@phendrick
I just haven’t yet gotten down w hope/faith that this will go to a jury trial.
Hope it does.
@phendrick
I’m expecting lots of legal claims from the defendants about “acts of God”, “natural castastrophies”, “sovereign immunity”, “ERCOT does not sell or supply energy”, etc etc etc.
IE the usual stuff: “the Texas legislature is in our pocket, you can’t touch us” attitudes.
@f00l @phendrick You forgot “force majeure”.
@mike808 @phendrick
I’m sure there are many more spurious legal terms destined to be misused to the full, in this matter
the whole situation has had effects far and wide.
up here in OH, My nephew works at a Whirlpool factory building Freezers.
he went from working 6-12hr days last summer, to layoffs, with the few remaining (thankfully nephew included) working 4-8s.
all because they can’t get they can’t get enough of the Foam insulation they use.
it comes from a Huston area Supplier.
I burns my ass to no end how the utility companies can be at fault and still stick it to the customers.
Out here in the land of fruits and nuts (California), we have the electrical companies. And let’s not forget San Onofre where they went cheap and had reactor problems and the customers are footing a considerable part of the cleanup.
San Diego Gas and Electric - LA times:
The U.S. Supreme Court said Monday that it will not hear San Diego Gas & Electric’s appeal of a California Supreme Court case that rejected the utility’s request to put ratepayers on the hook for $379 million in costs related to the 2007 wildfires that blazed through San Diego County.
Pacific Gas and Electric for the fire damages (they declared bankruptcy).
Greed.
@lisaviolet, plus we have the highest electricity rates in the nation. And no one has ever been able to tell me why…
@haydesigner @lisaviolet Don’t even get me started with what is going on here. Some people haven’t gotten a water bill in years and then get one that is far beyond what anything other than a factory could use. The 43M the city won from the people who put in the new meters over some of these issues has “vanished” (so what else is new here)… and no one seems to do anything about any of this. Of course we had a 2019 EPA notice (that was not good) hidden from view and only surfaced after the 30 days of no water and then the fire in the water treatment plant that gave us more days without water. I do wonder if the fire was because no one was manning stations there (one of the EPA complaints that many stations that were supposed to have workers keeping an eye on things didn’t) as in no one was at work at all the night of the fire.
@haydesigner @lisaviolet Depends on who you compare to. TVA power is really cheap, because they built a bunch of dams in the rainiest part of the country, and added coal then nuclear. West coast there are a few large dams, but not the number and total output TVA gets, and never got the scale of nuclear going TVA did. There isn’t significant coal locally in the west either. Then demand grew fast in the west, so price went up, and of course the power companies are all publicly held companies providing profit to shareholders.
I think that before a company should be allowed to raise rates due to liability for something like a wildfire, they should have to cut dividends and management bonuses.
@haydesigner @kevinrs One of the main problems with the wildfires was poor maintenance of their equipment. They wanted the customers to take on the financial burden that the insurance companies didn’t cover.
I agree that shareholders should foot part of the pain of paying for this stuff. We bought Disney stock a thousand years ago (when I sold the stock I’d gotten when I worked at Waste Management back in the 80s). Last year, when everything was shut down? No dividends. At all.
Back when I got married (mid 80s) my mother-in-law followed the market. She had these huge sheets of paper that she’d make entries in. Back then, there was a cap on how much of a profit utilities could make. It was something like ten percent. Those days are gone.
And that’s how it should be. The stock market is a gamble, it’s not a sure thing.
Check out my energy company for the few years.
@haydesigner @Kidsandliz That’s just wrong. They replaced water meters in San Diego a couple of years ago and customers were getting way overcharged.
“Oh, you must have a leak somewhere” was the common response. But it happened with so MANY homes that there was an investigation into it and it was the water meters, not the water usage.
Brian’s bookkeeper when I met him was a childhood friend of his. Her second husband worked at one of the local water districts and told Brian what great benefits and pension plans they had (remember, this was back in the late eighties, early nineties). And that they charged customers accordingly. And of course, there were shenanigans between the company responsible for charging for the water in the southern California area. (The result - we’re in the Helix district.) Did our rates drop? Take a guess.
@haydesigner @kevinrs @lisaviolet
The problem with captured state-run corrupt energy boards/commissions is that once the forced cap on profit margins is removed, the path to growth isn’t through over-capitalization anymore, it’s from stripping costs because revenue is capped. People just aren’t going to pay $13K monthly energy bills. So if the profit has to come from somewhere, it is in selling off all that capitalized equipment and laying off all those workers.
All of that incentivizes this corporate asshattery in utility industries. Especially healthcare that is doing everything it can to pretend it isn’t a shared utility that everyone consumes, just like clean water, clean air, electricity, natural gas, internet, public transit, airspace, infrastructure, etc.
And what is really sad is that voters keep electing politicians whose policies enable and promote only more of the same abuse of their constituents by extraction industries that privatize revenue (to shareholders) and socialize costs (to the public, taxpayers or not, especially if they can target “those people”).
@haydesigner @kevinrs @mike808
With the San Onofre nuclear reactor shut down problems there was so much shady stuff going on with the California Public Utility Commission…
It was nuts.
@lisaviolet @mike808
Texas voters were told that energy rates would drop - considerably - when the current Texas system of energy source choices for businesses and homes was set up.
Voters were also told that maintenance and relativity would not suffer.
Both promises were total lies.
@f00l @mike808
Well now, there’s a surprise.
“We promise, this won’t hurt a bit.”
@f00l @lisaviolet
I can’t really feel sorry for Texans when they keep re-electing sociopathic fascists who screw the people they represent at every opportunity, particularly targeting their constituents that didn’t vote for them in their partisan insurrectionist warfare.
@f00l @lisaviolet
Said the Iceberg to the Titanic, “I promise, it’s just the tip.”
@lisaviolet @mike808
Yes. Texas is v busy becoming ever more idiotic and profoundly dishonest, in the political area.
@f00l @lisaviolet
Shit. Did Ted Cruz give away the secret January 6th?
@f00l @lisaviolet
Missouri isn’t far behind Texas in the race to the bottom. The legislature here rejected the part of the Governor’s 2021-2022 budget for the constitutionally mandated expansion of Medicaid overwhelmingly passed by the voters back in 2018.
“Who will pay for it?” was the utterly bullshit lie of an excuse. Ignoring the fact that the Fed’s are paying for it - passed with not one single Republican vote in either the House or Senate. And having complete amnesia about demanding “Who will pay for it?” when they gave away tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations.
Every single one of them voted repeatedly to “pay for” those tax cuts on the backs of the poor and middle class (what’s left of them).
And they wonder why corporations can’t relocate their headquarters out of Missouri fast enough. Boeing, May, A.G. Edwards, Mercantile Bank, MEMC, SBC (yes, a baby Bell), and soon, Centene (a Fortune 24 company headquartered in Clayton, MO, a suburb of St. Louis with 16,000 jobs.)
There isn’t a hell that burns hot enough for them.