- #36
russ_watters
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I don't think electricity works that way anywhere in the US. It's a privately-provided consumer product, not a government service.StatGuy2000 said:The question is not if the private citizens will ultimately pay. The question is HOW it will be paid.
The fairest and the most sensible way to do so would be to increase state income taxes...
"A special levy" doesn't make sense to me, as the government isn't providing the service, but whatever you charge an electric company gets spread out amongst the customers on pretty much a per kWh basis. It doesn't do what you're hoping to see; using this as an opportunity for wealth re-distribution....or for the state of Texas to charge a special levy on the energy companies, to spread the cost out so that the the poor or middle-class are not unduly burdened.
It seems like in Texas the primary culprit here was winterization, and if any grid lacked capacity it was probably the natural gas grid, not the electric grid.1. If the issue with Texas (as opposed to other states in the US) is that the electric grid does not have sufficient capacity to provide electricity to its citizens, for whatever reason (my own suspicion is major population growth over the past many years without sufficient investment in building greater capacity), then how much needs to be invested now to increase capacity and winterize the grid (among other required changes)?
I don't have specifics, but I would think on an ongoing/moving forward basis the added cost of providing a more robust generating capacity (like buying winterized wind turbines) is not very significant. Going back and retrofitting a lot of equipment as a one-time charge would be expensive though. But here's the thing: we're in the midst of a massive energy transition already. If this is a once a decade problem, maybe making new equipment more robust moving forward would be good enough to avoid a repeat in 10 years.