Top Texas officials warn of power plant shortages

[TexasTowelie]

AUSTIN (AP) — The private companies that generate electricity in Texas are not building enough new capacity to meet the state's future needs, top officials told lawmakers Thursday.

"The basic problem that we see at this time is that generators are not building generation capacity sufficient to meet the ever increasing demand of a growing Texas," Donna Nelson, the chairwoman of the Public Utilities Commission, told the Texas House State Affairs Committee.

Low natural gas prices that discourage new construction as well as difficulty getting financing for new projects are the main culprits, she added.

Texas has deregulated its electricity market so that power companies buy electricity from private generators when it's needed and pay only for what they use.

http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/articles/officials-136766-warn-plant.html

[LiberalEsto]

1. That's deregulation for you!

Deregulating utilities is one of the stupidest things state governments did in the past 12 years.

The result of deregulation is that the executives at utilities don't give a damn about anything except giving themselves fat raises and bonuses, and making sure the stock pays dividends.

Because of deregulation, utilities laid off way too many repair workers, public relations staff and other "unnecessary staff". They cut back drastically on maintenance and upgrades. All that matters now is short-term profits.

So when there is a long, messy power outage, as we've had in Maryland several times in the past few years, PEPCO has to wait several days for extra repair crews to arrive from other states. In order to keep the repair staff payroll at bare bones minimum, utilities created "reciprocal agreements" with utilities in other states to send repair crews to one another in emergencies. Which means it takes time to respond to emergencies.

And because there is no public relations staff, there is nobody to field calls from the public, the media or elected officials and tell them how long the outage will last.

Because there is little or no maintenance, the outages last longer and it is a lot more work to get things fixed.

And finally, there are few if any consequences for the utilities. Our state board that "regulates" utilities in Maryland might say "tsk, tsk" and tell them they might not get as large a rate increase next time they apply.