Ep. 189 Josiah Neeley Gives the Other Side on What Happened With the Texas Power Freeze
Josiah Neeley is the Texas Director and Resident Senior Fellow in Energy for the R Street Institute. He has a lively discussion, pushing back on some of Bob’s previously articulated points regarding the recent Texas freeze and blackouts.
Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest:
- The YouTube version of this interview.
- Josiah’s article on the Texas freeze.
- Bob’s article on the Texas freeze.
- Help support the Bob Murphy Show.
The audio production for this episode was provided by Podsworth Media.
About the author, Robert
Christian and economist, Chief Economist at infineo, and Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute.
I work for a small municipal utility in Missouri (in SPP) and actually had my hand on the button during the rolling blackouts. Tuesday morning at 7am, Feb 16th, we got a call from our control area operator (the Soutwest Power Administration – a federal entity) to drop 4 MW of load immediately. They had been directed by SPP to drop load and because SPA has no load of their own, they had to pass down the command to their customers. We had no plan for rolling blackouts prior to this (SPP had never issued one in their 80 year history). Our decisions of which load to drop were predicated on many factors but mainly: critical loads (waste water/drinking water facilities, hospital, fire and police departments, auxiliary Power Plant loads) and actual load available to drop.
Because of the extreme low temps, ice/snow, the holiday week (President’s Day) and natural gas shortage/high prices, our industrial loads were already low which left mainly residential load as our only available load to shed. We were able to keep it to 20-30 minutes except for 2 times which we encountered freezing/cold load pickup issues with our equipment. I think our longest was 50 min. The load shedding lasted for about 2.5 hours.
The bizarre thing was we were running our own diesel generation and only pulling about 10 MW off the grid anyways. By the time we contacted our industry customers to inform them they’d be getting shutoff and they better ramp down, our load had fallen about 6MW instead of the 4 we were requested.
While I have listened to several episodes related to the Texas Freeze, I must take issue with Josiah Neeley on one issue related to BP. Everyone who works in the oil patch knows the attitude at BP is, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Maintenance is terrible. Eventually things actually break.
With this attitude no one was surprised when the Deep Horizon disaster struck. Everyone was saying, “Now they will have to pay the price.” What has surprised everyone is what a low price they actually paid. Sure they shelled out a lot of cash. But, they don’t have regulators breathing down their neck every moment of every day. They don’t have hotlines set up so people can register frivolous complaints that take thousands of dollars to investigate and possibly do something cosmetic just to placate complainers. BP has a bad record among those who work with them. They cover up their problems and spend a lot on publicity.
I shared episodes 188 and 189 in the comments under this article (below) in Facebook. Ot course the article never gets around to actually making an argument that connects the recent Texas blackouts with “deregulation”. The comments were horrible too. Anyway, thanks, Bob, for all that you do.
https://www.kut.org/business/2021-07-26/how-deregulation-laid-the-foundation-for-texas-february-blackouts