A hypothetical 100MW power plant than ran continuously during the 3 days of rolling blackouts ‘earned’ $65,000,000. The average price for this electricity during ‘normal’ times is $250,000.

If you don’t understand the Republican’s goal in deregulation, this is it. The goal is to introduce massive volatility into the system, that can then be used to reap huge windfall profits for producers.

The losses, as always, get handed off to the consumers.

This is what happened to the financial industry. The industry politely asked to be deregulated, swearing, honest, you can trust us. And then they collapsed the market. Who paid? Not the industry. We all did.

And that’s what’s going to happen here. Upgrades are going to be made to the grid, are going to keep their $65M per 100MW in profit and pass along the cost of the upgrades to you. Centerpoint, Oncor, etc are going to be happy to reap the rewards of their manipulative behavior and pass that cost along to you.

The regulator will be made the culprit for the failures, instead of the political process and the industry. Why the regulator? Because then they ‘can’t be trusted to regulate’ in the future.

The only way to prevent this is for there to be strong regulation to ensure they have to use most of the revenue they receive to generate electricity.

EDIT: These figures were calculated using price data across the three-day blackout period published by ERCOT. To add insult to injury, this post was originally submitted to /r/houston and then pro-utility mods there removed it.