Reading and Podcast Picks is a collection of what I’ve been reading and listening to over the last week or so about energy topics.

In addition to these R&P Picks, paid subscribers receive access to the full archives, Grid Roundups, and select episodes of the Energy Capital Podcast, including this one with philanthropist, investor, and former gas trader John Arnold.

Houston has the worst power outages in the nation; how bad is it in your ZIP code? | KPRC Houston

Some zip codes in the Houston area had as many as seven outages in August. There were no hurricanes, no historic heat waves – just a lot of blue-sky outages.

In this story from KPRC, Senator Lois Kolkhorst pledged to do something about it. Good – except Senators said they’d do something about utility failures after Beryl and did very little.

What Happens Next?

Doug Lewin

·

July 30, 2024

It’s time the Legislature prioritizes pay for performance: give utilities both upside and downside risk based on the total amount of outages and speed to restore service after a storm.

I wrote about it after Hurricane Beryl a year ago:

Doug Lewin

·

July 24, 2024

The old model of utility regulation is broken; it’s time to fix it by rewarding utilities when they perform well and penalizing them when they don’t. Here’s how.

The government’s own data rebuts Trump’s claims about wind and solar prices | Politico

The Administration continues to make demonstrably false claims about renewables. Politico did an excellent job putting together the evidence.

“Adding more wind and solar to the grid have one guaranteed effect: They make electricity more expensive,” Wright, a former oil industry CEO, told reporters last month in Washington.

But federal energy data undermines those arguments.

“I really think the data say pretty much the opposite” of Wright’s claims, said Joshua Rhodes, an electricity grid expert at the University of Texas-Austin whose research has found that renewable power has lowered electricity prices for customers in Texas, a state where wind and solar produce more than 30 percent of the state’s mix.

According to the EIA figures, Texas’ power cost an average of 10.24 cents per kilowatt-hour in June of this year. That price was lower than electricity costs in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and seven other Southern states. Only Arkansas, Louisiana and Oklahoma had cheaper power in the South.

More broadly, EIA data shows that states that have been the quickest to add wind and solar generation to the grid have had lower power prices.

A majority of the 32 states with the fastest rising renewable resources voted for Trump and have Republican governors. The Administration’s policies will hurt those states.

And it’s not just renewables the Administration is hurting…

Buyer’s remorse in the Permian? Trump’s energy policies are gutting the oil patch | The Houston Chronicle (gift link)

I wrote about the limits of “Drill, baby, drill” as a policy after Trump’s election.