Apparently Texas is having issues again today. High temperatures, more demand, more outages especially at thermal temperatures. Head is buried in a proposal, but just want to quickly post some reminders and context: 1. Thermal outages INCREASE at low AND high temperatures. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…. So record temperatures might lead to record outages.

Why I think energy-only markets will not work in a changing climate: (1) they assume rational actors with perfect information and (2) the limits on letting the market reflect real scarcity pricing will likely only get worse. (1) The underlying premise - profit-maximizing gencos will have a strong incentive to invest given scarcity pricing. As @JesseJenkins pointed out - every gas plant offline wishes they were online. They would have printed $$$ the past few days.

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.

I suspect a lot of utilities, regulators, & policymakers are asking themselves: is our power system prepared for climate change? Below, a short thread with suggested analyses and action items in prioritized order. Would love to hear other's thoughts. 1. What is your planning horizon? Are your IRPs, reliability analyses, capacity markets, etc looking out far enough ahead to ensure that investments now will fare well in 10, 20, 30 years?