What's wrong with the grid?
Warning: by the end of this thread I will probbably be ranting!
IMHO
1. De-regulation was for the benefit of Enron and companies like them. They created a "middleman" market whose profits come from increased rates to the consumer. Everyone points to Texas as a model for de-regualtion, yet the company's that were exempted from "competition" (coops and municipals) are ALL cheaper than those offering "choice".
2.Gaming continues. We get ERCOT capacity alerts all the time, even in mild weather. The reason is none of the generators will commit to load in the morning hours. This creates a "shortfall of generation" and the resulting emergency drives the price up. THEN the generators fire up at the higher rates.
3.It's really hard to keep trees out of transmission and distribution lines if every time you go to cut one, you get sued by the land owner and his EPA lawyer. The Feds like to blame the utilities greed on not doing maintenance, yet won't pass the laws allowing them to do the maintenance.
4. North Americans are gluttons. It's ridiculous that a 4 member family needs a 3500 square foot home and the resulting energy required to heat/cool it. 25 years ago, we hung 7.5 and 10 KVA transformers on residences. Now we routinely hang 25 KVA's on average houses and often go to 50 and 75 KVA units on the rich ones.
5. Nobody wants a transmission line in their own back yard. Everybody wants the power and Dadgummit, the government ought to make those @$#%@* utilities get us more power.....as long as it's in your back yard, not mine.
6. If you think gouging the consumer is over yet, just wait. The Public Utility Commision of Texas has presented a strawman to REQUIRE utilities to install IDR (interval data recorders) metering on residences with the provision that the costs involved will, by mandate, be passed on to the consumer. The theory here is that if the homeowner has "real-time data and pricing", he can make intelligent decisions on his energy consumption. (Based on the assumption that a guy who can't figure out how to turn his own AC thermostat up in the summer to lower his bill will actuall follow the competitive market on a 15 minute interval basis to make the same decision.) So the utility has to install a high dollar meter, the communications infra-structure to collect, analyze and store MASSIVE amounts of data and regurgitate that same data back to the consumer on a real time basis. And the consumer is required to foot the bill.
As you can tell by now, I work for one of the hated POCO's, but quite frankly I sick of seeing us get the ALL the blame for high prices that are largely fixed by the lobbyists who buy our legislators.
Am I ranting yet?