Culpability

 

Culpability

 

        This builds on my last essay because, as events related to the Texas power outages continue to unfold, we are hearing even more from Republicans attempting to shift blame to Democrats who endorse alternate energy sources, with wind their primary target. I will lay out the details of why this a Texas and Texas Republican leadership problem. Period.

        The failure of roughly half of the wind turbines in Texas earlier this week isn’t the biggest cause of the power shortage crisis that has left one-third of Texans without power in historic freezing conditions. Frozen infrastructure at gas and coal power stations, such as pipelines, are the main culprit. Of the total amount of power that suffered outages, wind accounted for only some 13%, a far smaller share than accounted for by coal, gas and nuclear plants.

        Still, wind power is a major resource in Texas: it supplied 23% of the state’s electricity in 2020, second only to the 40% share by natural gas, and had been producing a larger share than normal before the widespread outages. Wind has also attracted an outsize share of blame for the Texas fiasco, including a Wall Street Journal editorial that attacked its susceptibility to the freezing weather as another sign of its unreliability.

         Anyone for a reality check? Why don’t wind turbines fail all the time in colder climates, such as Canada, Sweden or the American Midwest? Because they prepare for it, realizing that electrical power is a modern essential, that’s why. The answer, in short, is that turbines in colder places are typically equipped with de-icing and other tools, such as built-in heating. In Texas, where the weather is almost never this cold, they usually are not. This is partially due to a “hands off” attitude re: public utility regulation as state policy.

        “Cold weather kits can keep [wind turbines] operating when temperatures plunge. This is the norm in colder states and in Europe,” says Samuel Brock, a spokesman for the American Clean Power Association. “Historically in Texas, given the warm climate, it hasn’t been necessary.” But that doesn't mean it might be, huh?

        Bullshit! During the February 2011 Southwest cold snap, an unprecedented 16% of wind units within Texas grid operator Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ operation region reportedly failed—709 MW due to blade icing and another 1,237 MW because frigid temperatures exceeded turbine limits, specifically minimum operating temperatures. Let me reiterate; they knew it could happen, because it already had, nine years earlier! And, anyone literate in the Texas wind energy market should have known it was preventable.

        Note this again: While Republican talking heads from Senators to Governor to the incredibly ignorant Tucker Carlson, slammed renewables as responsible for the Texas 2021 disaster, they (the Texans) were covering their asses for knowing it could happen, and did in 2011, and having done F***-all to prepare for a conceivable reoccurrence.

         If you appreciate irony, think of it like this: Most Republicans and many Texans are climate change deniers, yet it almost seems they were counting on Global Warming to prevent a repeat of the 2011 February cold snap! Here’s another touch of irony: Everyone, from Cruz to you name it, is blaming Democratic “green” initiatives for the emergence of wind power in Texas power generation, and by extension the current disaster.

        When we travelled through west Texas in 2006, we were struck by the huge wind farms east of El Paso. Who was POTUS? Bush43. Who was governor?  Rick Perry, later Trump Energy Secretary. Both Republicans. Under their aegis, Texas actually led the nation in new wind power installations with mammoth state incentives to build more, in 2001, 2003, 2005 and now leads the nation in wind power production. In fact, if Texas were a nation, it would rank fifth in the world in that statistic! Texans blaming Democrats for wind initiatives is as bad as Donald Trump’s worst whopper.

        Wind generators in places like Canada typically install “cold weather packages” to extend temperature ranges, using up to 200 kW to 300 kW of parasitic power per turbine at conditions below –20C for heating all temperature sensitive components, components such as the nacelle space, yaw drive and pitch motors, and the gearbox, slip ring, controller and control cabinet, and battery. Similar use of small amounts of generated capacity and/or carbon blade coating are facts of life for most wind farm operators.  GE’s Cold Weather Extreme package for its 2.5 x l turbine, for example, ensures operations in temperatures to –30C (22 below zero, F!) and a “survival mode” to –40C. It just didn’t get that cold in Texas, folks!

        Lack of regulation, ignoring industry standards, Republican insistence on free market pricing of a critical commodity, and refusal to be part of the larger national grid are all legacies of  36 consecutive years of Republican (non) governance in the Lone Star state.

Dear Texans:

 

Dear Texans,

        I am genuinely sorry for those of you who have been victimized by some of the others of you. I know it doesn’t always get cold and snow a lot where you live, but it has done so before, and probably will again. I’ll give you a small consolation – you’ve been lied to, before and after this latest frontier clusterfuck, and  you may well be again.  

        Here’s what your stalwart Senator, Canadian Rafael Cruz, said a while ago, when California suffered rolling blackouts caused by over-reliance on intermittent energy sources (solar) without sufficient storage capacity to accommodate high demand situations such as the August heat waves and accompanying A/C demand,

“Ted Cruz@tedcruz (He doesn’t use his real name (Rafael) for the same reasons Chuck Norris refuses to go by Carlos)

Aug 19, 2020: California is now unable to perform even basic functions of civilization, like having reliable electricity.

Biden/Harris/AOC want to make CA’s failed energy policy the standard nationwide. Hope you don’t like air conditioning!”

        This (rolling blackouts) was predictable and is an ongoing issue with solar energy, however Trump was POTUS in 2020, while Cruz slammed Biden/ Harris. The only issue was electricity, but Cruz implies they had nothing but sticks and rocks. The real problem with solar is several fold. There is a large carbon footprint involved in the manufacturing process, which somewhat offsets Solar’s low climate impact compared to other sources, excluding fossil fuels.  Solar is attractive in southern areas, but, unfortunately, the farther north we go, the shorter the daylight hours and in winter, when we need power the most for "green" heating, they are shortest. Battery technology is far from adequate in the foreseeable future to support metropolitan areas with solar, if ever. The California debacle proved it.

        The Walt Disney Company is just months away from generating enough renewable solar energy to fully power two of its four parks at the Walt Disney World Resort in central Florida. But... the energy from Disney solar farms will not actually go to Disney's theme parks, but rather into the local power grid. Why? So that when solar is inadequate, the power produced by the utility’s other modes is available – Disney don’t do blackouts!

        Now back to a Cruz update: When it gets really cold, it can be hard to produce electricity, as customers in Texas and neighboring states are finding out. But it’s not impossible. Operators in Alaska, Canada, Maine, Norway and Siberia do it all the time. In Texas, several factors come into play. The first “It almost never happens so why prepare?”  It turns out a lot of Texas electricity (just under 70%) is produced by burning fossil fuel. Not good for the environment, although natural gas is far better than coal, but gas lines can contain moisture which can freeze, causing disruption in flow, ergo loss of a generator. More seriously the compressors which move natural gas, unready for high demands, can fail (and some have). In a single-digit Texas temperature environment, pipelines froze up because there was some moisture in the gas. Pumps slowed. Diesel engines to power the pumps refused to start. One power plant after another went offline. Even a reactor at one of the state’s two nuclear plants went dark, hobbled by frozen equipment.      

        Additionally, wind turbines, which produce about 15% of Texas power, unprepared for cold weather (as they are across Scandinavia Denmark and the US northeast, where it gets colder, longer) can freeze and go off-line. It is of interest that Cruz and others at first singled out the loss of the minor amount from wind as the primary reason the grid failed.  
Here's another Texas horse’s rump:

Rep. Dan Crenshaw@RepDanCrenshaw

Feb 16, 2021

“To make matters worse, existing storage of wind energy in batteries was also gone, because batteries were losing 60% of their energy in the cold.

This is what happens when you force the grid to rely in part on wind as a power source. When weather conditions get bad as they did this week, intermittent renewable energy like wind isn’t there when you need it.”

        But was that the problem? Hardly. In fact, what has seriously messed with life in Texas is not an engineering problem, nor is it “frozen wind turbines” blamed by prominent Republicans. It is a financial structure for power generation that offers no incentives to power plant operators to prepare for winter. In the name of deregulation and free markets, critics say, Texas has created an electric grid that puts an emphasis on cheap prices over reliable service with essentially no state wide oversight or even requirement to maintain a position within a regulated state-wide power grid. Look again at the word “deregulation”. This was a large vertebra in the backbone of Trump’s attempts top make the federal government more “business friendly”, always at the expense of the rest of us. “Public Utilities commissions? Nah, we don’t need ’em.”

        In the absence of state level utility regulation and pandering to energy producers, Texas created a free for all where electricity prices, instead of being fixed and predictable were volatile. In a mild winter this lack of preparedness coupled with low usage could lead to very low utility rate even with a regulated statewide grid. Instead, under current  conditions, small producers were forced to buy kilowatt hours at demand-based prices which producers were free to charge. What might this look like, you ask?  One utility company, appropriately named Griddy, which sells power at wholesale rates to retail customers without locking in a price in advance, told its patrons Tuesday to find another provider before they get socked with tremendous bills. Where does one go to “find another provider?”

        The train wreck that some Texan utilities markets have become Monday and Tuesday has seen the wholesale price of electricity in Houston go from $22 a megawatt-hour to about $9,000. Meanwhile, 4 million Texas households have been without power and several individuals have died.

        So, whine about “that danged gummint regulation” all you want. But this is why it is appropriate.

        Coda: there is another side to this story related to an industry with which I am more than passing familiar. Oddly enough, it places me on the “other” side of the “green” argument. Amidst all the hype about clean and renewable energy, one alternative is continually swept under the rug. The cleanest bulk power source is hydro (dams, lakes, turbines etc.) In Norway, with lots of high mountain lakes and streams, they produce all their power that way and, until recently, had some to sell to Sweden. In the USA, that entails large dams on rivers which are also transportation routes, and in some cases, like the Columbia and Snake interfere with Salmon runs. Hydro is great but grossly insufficient for the USA.

         On the other hand, the second cleanest mass power production mode is nuclear. NO, stop it, it just is, even if you don’t like it. Every other mode of power production has killed infinitely more people than the entire nuclear power industry in America, ignorant nay-sayers notwithstanding.

        The advantages of Nuclear power plants include being able to locate them in isolated areas, high power production when needed, low production when not, and, with present technologies, refueling intervals of decades. This doesn’t even include the even safer Salt breeders being developed by India and China while we twiddle our thumbs, scared by a movie (China Syndrome) and a “no one got hurt” incident (Three Mile Island).

        We are rightly concerned about Fukushima and Chernobyl, but in the case of the first, no such site design would ever be approved in such a location in the US and the second, Chernobyl #4, was a classic of Soviet era “pushing” to operate a reactor which should never even have been built. (Huge reactor design flaws and several serious breaches of protocol during simulated power outage safety test) I know, I know, “But what about the lasting effects of these incidents?”

        We’ve all seen or heard the predictions of dire consequences, and yet:  comprehensive investigations and assessments of TMI by several well-respected organizations, such as Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh, have concluded that in spite of serious damage to the reactor, the actual release had no detectable short- or long-term effects on the physical health of individuals or the environment.  It has been a 40-year Public Health study, the longest of its kind. The other two reactors suffered from fatal site design issues (Fukushima) which should have considered the possibility of the Tsunami which disabled emergency cooling pumps, and a dangerous, almost unthinkably unsafe, design at Chernobyl #4. Even so, More Americans who live within a 50-mile radius of a coal fired generation station have died and will continue to die of respiratory failures and cancers than died in both cases. In the USA, No one died at TMI either during or after.

        So, yes, Texas has had more deaths in four days of 2021 due to under-regulation and blatant neglect of reasonable supervision of their power grid, such as it is, than in 65 years of Electric power production in the US with Nuclear reactors.  And, by the way, in West Texas, around El Paso, where they are connected across state lines into the national grid, they had power all the time. Finally, remember, Rick (barely literate) Perry, former Texas Governor was Trump’s first Energy Secretary. Cue the crickets.

Not Unique, but Certainly Symptomatic

 

Game Stop Ain’t The Only One!

        We’ve seen a lot of “news” and or commentary recently on the Game Stop stock fiasco (details on the specifics later). It seems it’s more newsworthy when a group of non-Wall Street types hype a stock to artificially drive stock prices up. What floored me were several commentaries on the possible effects of these events on hedge funds. I say this because the implication was that the noble hedge funds are worthy of our sympathies and respect.

        We should seriously consider renaming the NYSE “Vegas On Wall Street” if current shenanigans continue or are allowed to. The proliferation of hedge funds has done several things, all based on the manipulation of financial instruments several light years removed from just “money” or share values as a reflection of a corporation’s actual value. Of course, history teacher that I am, here’s some background, not on hedge funds which are late 1940s inventions but on         investors and “bubbles.”

        Tulipmania, which swept Holland in the 1630s is one of the earliest recorded instances of an irrational asset bubble. During the Dutch Tulip Bubble, tulip prices soared twentyfold between `November 1636 and February 1637 before plunging 99% by May 1637. Invest 100 guilders in 1636, see it become 1 guilder a year later! As bubbles typically do, Tulipmania consumed a wide cross-section of the Dutch population, and at its peak, some tulip bulbs commanded prices greater than the price of some houses!

        The UK South Sea Bubble of 1720 was created by somewhat more complex circumstances than Tulipmania. The South Sea Company, in 1711, was promised a monopoly by the British government on all trade with the Spanish colonies of South America. Expecting a repeat of the success of the East India Company, which provided England a flourishing trade with India, investors snapped up shares of the South Sea Company. While directors circulated tall tales of unimaginable riches in the South Seas (lied), shares of the company surged in 1720, from £128 in January to £1050 in June, before collapsing in subsequent months and causing a severe economic crisis.

        Far more current was the Dotcom bubble: When it comes to sheer scale and size, few bubbles match the dotcom bubble of the 1990s. Rapidly increasing popularity of the Internet triggered a massive wave of speculation in "new economy" businesses. As a result, hundreds of dotcom companies achieved multi-billion-dollar valuations as soon as they went public. (no tangible product, no customers, just “code.” Technology/dot-com company stocks, went from a level of under 500 at the beginning of 1990 to a peak of over 5,000 in March 2000.8 The index crashed shortly thereafter, dropping nearly 80% by October 2002 and triggering a U.S. recession.

 

        The Great Depression was based on the myth that everyone should be in the stock market and that their investments were safe. Brokers were only too happy to borrow from banks and “re-lend” to investors for stock purchases. The hyping of stocks helped drive process far beyond actual asset value and eventually, even in the face of Presidential assurances that things were fine, someone, somewhere, thought, “Maybe these share prices aren’t really based on true monetary value. Perhaps I should sell before anyone else figures it out.” Unfortunately for many (and their banks) that notion spread with light speed and the world spiraled into a depression lasting a decade.

        As a result, in the US, banking regulations were tightened with the Glass-Steagall Banking of 193. All US banks had been allowed to use depositor’s funds without limitations or oversight, losing millions for depositors who had never played the market. Glass-Steagall effectively separated commercial banking from investment banking and created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, among other things.

        Glass-Steagall was “eroded” over the course of several decades, the intended clear-cut separation between commercial and investment activities gradually deteriorated. Multiple factors contributed to this effect, including market forces, statutory changes, and the exploitation of regulatory loopholes. Unmentioned is a much simpler factor – greed. Some of these erosions of the Act’s intent had much to do with market tactics leading to 2008 Housing Bubble collapse.

        The 2008 fiasco has been exhaustively covered, but in simplest terms it boils down to “securities, or financial instruments, whose real value was far below advertised and whose risk of default was grossly underplayed until it happened.” Added to the mix was the rise of hedge funds which in some eases bet on stocks to fail, vice prosper. The rub here is that shares prices in these funds are so fluid that, on any given day, value and price are just words, not synonyms.  “Hedge fund” is simply another name for an investment partnership that has freer rein to invest aggressively and in a wider variety of financial products than mutual funds.

        Mutual fund managers analyze stocks for value and growth potential and investors, many of them state/municipal/union retirement funds expect growth in their share values which may be widely varied to decrease risk. On the other hand, Hedge funds also use far riskier tactics such as “short selling” and investment in much riskier securities (such as the high-risk overrated mortgages which led to the Great Recession in 2008.

        Following the events of 2008, Congress took another shot at reining in unregulated greed with the Dodd-Frank Act, whose stated aim was to “Promote the financial stability of the United States by improving accountability and transparency in the financial system, to end "too big to fail", to protect the American taxpayer by ending bailouts, to protect consumers from abusive financial services practices, and for other purposes.” It is noteworthy that, from his first day in office, Donald Trump, himself and his businesses heavily leveraged (in debt), worked to erode the authority and reach of the act. One hopes the Biden administration will remedy these issues.   

        So, what happened with Game Stop? Game Stop is a “brick and mortar” (real stores) purveyor of video games and related accessories. It was struggling through the pandemic, and the outlook for continued operation nationwide was declining. Normally, in this situation, stock prices would decrease and, eventually lead to going out of business. This was true of not only Game Stop, but AMC theaters, Blackberry and Nokia.

        In such situations, where share prices are dropping and predicted to continue doing so, hedge funds, like vultures, flock to the corpse. This is part of the hedge fund tactic of profiting from the misfortune of others. In the case of Game Stop, it was the tactic of short-selling which, in simplest terms, means that, once the fund manager(s) decide a stock will continue to decline in price, they may “borrow” shares of that stock on the premise that they will return them at some time certain. You can ‘short’ a position in the stock market, which means selling something that you do not own, but then you must ‘close’ that position also, which means buying that same position back at a later time.

        In a simple example: assume a trader believes Game Stop is overvalued at (just for a simple example) $50 per share. He may “borrow” 100 shares from a broker, who may then sell them for him at the current price – a $5,000 transaction. The investor must repay the shares to the lender,  not the money. In the ensuing (days/weeks) the share price drops to $25. The investor’s due date for repayment to the broker arrives, but he only has to deliver 100 shares of Game Stop, so he buys them at the new lower price of $2500 and pockets the $2500 difference as profit.

        Short selling a stock is riskier than traditional investing. With traditional investing, there is a limit to how much someone can lose, that being the value of the original investment. With short selling, there is no limit to how much money someone could lose, as there is no limit to how much a stock could appreciate. With Game Stop, which does have fans who want them to remain in business, and via a Reddit investor “group,” individuals began buying Game Stop which was already being “shorted” by a number of hedge funds. And so, these gamers and people on social media said, ‘Hey, we’re going to revolt. We’re going to start buying this stock.’ And so, when GameStop stock started to rise, all of these short sellers (Hedge Funds) had no choice but to buy at higher prices. When the short sellers were forced to buy the stock at higher prices, it exacerbated the situation because then the stock price rose even more. As the demand for the stock went up, so, naturally did the share price…a lot!    

        GameStop was selling at $12.72 on December 11, last year, but by January 27^th was trading at $347.51!! Did they open new stores? Nope. Introduce new products? Nope. Will the price remain that high? Nope. Game Stop closed Friday at $63.77, a decrease from its high of 545%. Meanwhile young gamers, some of whom invested their parents’ retirement in Game Stop, are crushed. The good news (if any)?  Hedge funds which shorted game stop took a billions of dollars bath. As they unloaded during the run up, being forced to repay borrowed stocks at ten times or more per share, depending on how high their threshold of pain is, they affirmed the fragile and increasingly volatile nature of playing with other peoples’ money. Meanwhile hedge fund managers reap multi-millions annually, risking little or none if their own money. Yet when a Liz Warren calls for more stringent controls on financial markets??   

Life Lessons Learned

 

Life lessons learned

 

Being pleasant and understanding with people generally takes far less energy than being a dick.

Always check the status of the roll of toilet tissue before you sit.

The probability of the dishwasher being full of clean dishes is directly proportional to the number of dirty ones you just created.

Bras never, ever, go in the dryer.

Always check the bottom of the bag before you pick up dog poop 

The trash will never take itself out.

Golf is inherently evil.

Barking dogs, like people, rarely bite. It's the quiet ones who bite you in the ass.

I don't automatically mistrust people who don't like dogs. On the other hand, I am always suspicious of people whom dogs don't like.

Those who know the most about good teaching tend to get the least press.

Dogs have owners, cats, on the other hand, see us more as staff.

"Pre-election season" is far too long. The Brits do it right by limiting campaigning to six weeks.

Dogs have many different expressions with many meanings, Cats do too, but they all essentially mean "feed me, bitch."

There are people walking among us who cannot or will not recognize the truth about some things. 

Assisted suicide is illegal in most states, but you can buy cigarettes anywhere.

Canine breeders are far more selective than human ones, and generally to a better end.

The later I get up, the earlier the trash pickup occurs.

If a drug's side effects outnumber the benefits, don't use it.

You have been lied to; broken cookies still have calories.