Catching up on some good reads and this one is most interesting. Concerns the boom and bust cycles of the Texas energy sector.
Texas is the only state that has its own electrical grid. It is operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ercot), and was created largely to avoid federal regulations. Because of the intense energy needs of the oil-and-gas business—it takes a lot of power to run oil refineries and petrochemical plants—Texas uses more electricity than any other state. (California, the second-largest consumer, uses about two-thirds as much.) Yet electricity in Texas is cheaper than the national average, and in some places it is free at night. That’s because Texas gets about seventeen per cent of its electricity from wind power, and wind generally blows more at night, when demand is lower. The plains and mesas of West Texas, and the coastal region south of Galveston, are lined with regiments of wind turbines. They are so heavily subsidized by the federal government that wind-energy producers sometimes pay companies to take the energy off their hands, in order to receive federal tax credits. In October, 2016, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, broke a bottle of champagne atop a three-hundred-foot turbine to inaugurate a vast new wind farm in Scurry County, three hours west of Fort Worth; it will provide a million megawatt hours a year to the Texas grid.
CAFFEINATED POLITICS 