How much has the #TexasBlackout cost? I've been thinking a lot about this. Planning is all about balancing risks - the risk of overinvesting and spending unnecessary $, and the risk of underinvesting and incurring the costs of losing electricity access.
How do we quantify those costs of losing access? They are largely non-monetary, especially when you think of the pain, suffering, and deaths we have seen. And then there's plenty of other damages we don't normally include, like home damage from burst pipes.
But we can try to put a price tag on the "value of lost load" (VOLL) through various methods - surveys, production functions, prior blackouts. ("What would you pay to have power?")
Those estimates put the VOLL at $5,000-45,000/MWh, including in this study done for ERCOT: ercot.com/content/gridin…
@BPBartholomew has been tracking losses and estimates roughly 30 GWh of load shedding has occurred so far.
https://twitter.com/BPBartholomew/status/1362516641498755076?s=20
At $5-45k/MWh with 30 GWh of shed load, that cost is $5-42 BILLION. What could we have bought for $42 BILLION? Well, at $1000/kW for an NGCC new build, we could have built 42 GW of NEW gas - more than enough to cover the 30 GW shortfall.
Or better yet, we could have simply weatherized what we had already - for a fraction of the cost to build 30 GW of additional NGCCs!
Of course, this is easy in retrospect. But hopefully this demonstrates why planning properly is so important and valuable, especially in a changing climate when extremes and variability are being amped up:
https://twitter.com/TheEnergyCraig/status/1362048890304950272?s=20
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