Showing posts with label texas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label texas. Show all posts

Saturday, July 30, 2022

Harm reductions (fentanyl test strips) remain illegal in Texas

It's a long way from Texas to Vancouver. This recent story from the Texas Monthly caught my eye:

Fentanyl Test Strips Could Save Lives—But They’re Illegal in Texas By Jeff Winkler, July 22, 2022

"The most widely embraced method of harm reduction is offering users naloxone, known by the brand name Narcan, an easy-to-use medication capable of reversing the effects of an opioid overdose. All U.S. states, including Texas, have relaxed restrictions on access to naloxone amid the opioid epidemic’s “third wave,” which began in 2013 with the rise of fentanyl’s presence on the black market. A less-popular harm-reduction method is the creation of government-approved, supervised sites where users can get clean syringes and take drugs in the presence of a health-care worker. Just two such sites in the nation have been authorized—both in New York City.

"Fentanyl test strips fall somewhere in the middle in terms of their acceptance. The strips have become easier to access, as several states, including Tennessee and New Mexico, have recently decriminalized their possession. But they remain illegal in about half the states, including in Texas, where the strips are considered “drug paraphernalia,” meaning they fall into the same category as bongs and blunt papers. Since the passage of the 1973 Controlled Substances Act, Texas has banned any material intended for use in testing for or “analyzing” a controlled substance."

***********

It's based in part on this earlier report from State of Reform:

 Drug testing strips remain illegal in Texas despite recent rise in overdose deaths, by Boram Kim | May 14, 2022 

"In Harris County alone, fatal drug overdoses increased 52% from 2019 to 2021. County statistics show deaths involving fentanyl skyrocketed by 341% in the same period, from 104 to 459.

"Meanwhile, the Travis County Medical Examiner’s Office released 2021 figures that showed drug overdoses were the leading cause of accidental deaths for the first time in a decade. Approximately one-third of overdose deaths were caused by fentanyl."

**********

earlier:

Tuesday, May 17, 2022

Sunday, May 9, 2021

Texas electricity market design: replace ERCOT experts with political appointees

 The Texas Tribune has the story:

Overhaul of ERCOT board could replace experts with political appointees  By MITCHELL FERMAN

"AUSTIN, Texas -- During February's deadly winter storm, Gov. Greg Abbott and many state lawmakers quickly criticized the Electric Reliability Council of Texas because several members of its large governing board reside outside of Texas.

"Many of the out-of-state board members are experts in the electricity field, but resigned following criticism of the agency's oversight of the state's main power grid during the storm that left millions of Texans without electricity for days in freezing temperatures.

"State lawmakers are now trying to change the way ERCOT is governed by requiring members to live in Texas and giving more board seats to political appointees - changes that experts say may do little to improve the power grid.

"One former board member who resigned after the storm, Peter Cramton, criticized legislation for politicizing the grid operator's board.

"These people would be political types without electricity expertise," he told The Texas Tribune.

The Texa"s House has already approved House Bill 10, which would remove independent outside voices on the ERCOT board and replace them with five political appointees. The governor would appoint three of those people, while the lieutenant governor and speaker of the House would each appoint one. None of the appointees would be required to be electricity experts. The only requirement is that appointees live in Texas."

******************

Other posts on ERCOT.

Sunday, April 18, 2021

Texas gas and electricity

 The electric power system failure in Texas following severe winter weather continues to draw commentary (and may eventually draw politically actionable conclusions).  The supply chain of electricity proved complex: e.g. some electric generation depended on natural gas supplies that themselves required electricity.

Here are some recent entries.

From the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas:

Cost of Texas’ 2021 Deep Freeze Justifies Weatherization. by Garrett Golding, Anil Kumar and Karel Mertens

"Though the cost of annual preparations for extreme and relatively infrequent weather events has proven difficult for policymakers and industry to justify, the shocking aftermath of the February freeze and the resulting widespread power outage demand a careful re-examination. Our analysis indicates winterizing for extreme winter weather events appears financially reasonable.

...

"Temperatures dipped into the single digits and lower across much of Texas overnight on Feb. 14. Electricity demand surged as critical equipment failed at several power plants. Wind-farm output—already low due to diminished wind speeds—declined further as ice accumulated on turbine blades. Electricity generation declined yet again when gas-fired power plants were unable to procure needed gas supplies. Nearly 4 million Texas customers—representing more than 11 million people—lost power during the Arctic blast (Chart 1).


"While industry sources report gas production difficulties occurred because of wells and other such installations freezing, the bigger disruption began when power was cut to the wells, processing plants and compressor stations that move the gas into and along major pipelines serving power plants. During the storm, 38 of Texas’ 176 gas processing plants shut down due to weather conditions and electricity service disruption. Texas natural gas production dropped 45 percent Feb 13–17.

"This created a death spiral for electricity generation."

*************

Here's Peter Cramton in the Dallas News:

Natural gas producers hit the jackpot during the power outages, but they failed Texas The electrical grid is only as reliable as its fuel supply.  by Peter Cramton

"starting on Feb. 11, the storm exposed every Texas county and much of the Midwest to frigid temperatures. Gas field equipment froze, and gas production began falling on Feb. 12, according to the Energy Information Administration, ultimately dropping 45%. Outages from gas-fueled power plants were double what planning models forecasted in the extreme-storm scenario. (Renewable resources, wind plus solar, performed better than expected during the storm.)

"With a deep drop in electricity supply and a sharp increase in demand, the system operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, could not balance supply and demand without ordering controlled outages of about one-third of the system to prevent a catastrophic blackout. Those power cuts exacerbated gas delivery failures to many power plants.

"The failure of gas-fueled power was the proximate cause of the Texas electricity crisis. Had the gas supply been reliable, the electricity shortage would have been far less severe. 

...

"Fixing the Texas gas market is no easy task. Its regulator, the Texas Railroad Commission, is a textbook example of regulatory capture. For decades, the commission has operated as an advocate for the oil and gas industry. This cozy relationship contributed to the Texas disaster because the lack of gas field and pipeline preparation for cold was a major cause of the electricity outages — and one that better regulation would have avoided.

*******

And here's the WSJ:

A Failure of Texas-Size Proportions’—State Debates How to Overhaul Its Power Market. February storm exposed flaws in laissez-faire electricity system; fixes promise to be complex and costly. by Katherine Blunt and Russell Gold

"Fixing the market promises to be as complex as it is costly. The challenge facing Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and state lawmakers is how to make the state’s deregulated power market more reliable, while limiting added costs that would make its electricity more expensive.

"Texas operates the nation’s only pure “energy only” electricity market, one in which producers are paid just for the power they sell, not the ability to deliver whenever watts are needed. All other deregulated electricity markets in the U.S. offer power generators some form of payment for being ready to produce power, to ensure the market has sufficient capacity to reliably provide an essential resource.

"For most of the past two decades, the Texas approach worked. It helped the Lone Star State keep wholesale power prices for much of the past two years at less than $30 per megawatt-hour on average, well below most other regional power markets.

"But a Texas grid that valued inexpensive power over reliability failed spectacularly during February’s winter storm and frigid temperatures, leading not only to crushingly high electricity prices, but power and water shortages that virtually shut down the state’s economy, and frozen pipes that caused widespread property damage."

Net capacity of generators, minute-by-minute



Tuesday, March 30, 2021

Postmortems on the Texas electricity market failure

 The weather related failures of the Texas electricity market have prompted a number of fairly rapid postmortems (if that's the right word for a market that has since been restored to working order for normal circumstances).

Perhaps the most authoritative of these is by Peter Cramton, the veteran market designer who was vice chair and an independent director of the Electrical Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) board before resigning on February 24, 2021, at the request of Governor Abbott, along with the other non-Texan directors. 

Last Monday he posted a paper with his views on what happened and what improvements deserve consideration. A summary of the paper appeared in Utility Dive on Tuesday. The long piece covers more ground; the short article hits the highlights.

**************

Here's  a Q&A at the Yale School of Management, which goes intro some of the history of the market:

Why the Texas Power Market Failed, Q&A with Ed Hirs 

**************

Here's an op-ed from the Dallas Morning News, asking why the emergency prices weren't ended as soon as adequate supply was restored:

Why didn’t ERCOT put a stop to the massive electricity price spikes during the outages? Rather than allow power markets to return to normal, regulators kept prices at emergency level.  By Rob Snyder

***************

And these two posts, with different perspectives by different commentators, the first by a sociologist and the second by a geographer and a political scientist, appear on the University of Chicago's Stigler Center blog Promarket:

The Texas Blackouts and the Problems of Electricity Market Design  BY GEORG RILINGER, March 24, 2021

and

The Texas Power Failure: How One Market Model Discovered Its Natural Limits  BY EVE VOGEL, STEVEN K. VOGEL March 25, 2021


Tuesday, March 2, 2021

Electricity supply and electricity politics in Texas--an interview with Peter Cramton

 The veteran market designer Peter Cramton was among the members of the Board of Directors of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) who live outside of Texas and were asked to resign last week, following the winter storm that left many Texans without power, or with unexpected, very high electricity bills. ERCOT is the independent system operator, charged with running the network minute to minute.  

He's interviewed by Texas Public Radio:

Former ERCOT Board Member Says ‘Toxic Politics’ Spurred Resignations After Texas Grid Failure  Texas Public Radio | By Dominic Anthony Walsh

"Peter Cramton is an economics professor at the University of Cologne and the University of Maryland. He has expertise and experience in complex market designs, including electricity and radio spectrum markets. He served as an “independent director” on the board of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) from 2015 until last week.

"At his final board meeting, he said, “ERCOT was flying a 747. It had not one, but two engines experience catastrophic failure. (ERCOT) then flew the damaged plane for 103 hours before safely landing in the Hudson. In my mind, the men and women in the ERCOT control room are heroes.”

Here are some bits of the interview:

Dominic Walsh: Could you help me understand your role as an “independent director?” And does it make sense for some of the independent directors to live out of state? There's a lot of controversy around that.

Peter Cramton: What’s unusual is that we have a hybrid board that consists of “affiliated directors” that are affiliated with a particular stakeholder group. There's complete transparency on that, who they're affiliated with. And it is completely balanced. There are four affiliated directors representing the supply side, and there are four affiliated directors representing the demand side. So those are the two sides of almost every market — supply and demand, production and consumption — and there is a perfect balance. Then there's the “independent directors.” There's five independent directors, and the independent directors can have no association with either side of the market. The challenge with independent directors is: It's hard to find people that have the technical expertise, and (are) independent of the market participants. Now, here's the problem: So, one natural thing is you could say, "Well, you know, it's important that the directors live in Texas." Well, then you’d just be imposing another constraint. So, if we say, "OK, now you have to be independent from all market participants. You have to live in Texas. And you have to be an expert in a highly technical industry…" The reality is it's going to be very difficult to find people that fill all of these.

Walsh: So far, you've described a bunch of advocates for various sectors, and a bunch of experts. It sounds slightly more technocratic than democratic. So, where is the accountability to the public — the democratic element of the board?

Cramton: Absolutely. So, it's critically important. And that is the Public Utility Commission of Texas. So, there's a Public Utility Commission that consists of three commissioners, and they provide that oversight. And in fact, that oversight is incredibly important. So, for example, it's the Public Utility Commission that is responsible for the more delicate decisions that are made in the market. And the Public Utility Commission has oversight over all the market rules. What about a renegade Public Utility Commission? You know, who's watching them? Well, who's watching them: that's the legislature and the governor. The commissioners serve largely for the governor and legislature. And if they're doing something that the governor, the legislature does not like, then the governor and legislature can take action to replace the commissioners or whatever other action they want. So that's the continued hierarchy in this governance structure, and that's all within Texas.

Walsh: Why did you resign? It sounds like you're a big fan of ERCOT and their mission. It sounds like you think ERCOT performed well throughout this. Why did you and other members of the board ultimately resign?

Crampton: We resigned, in short, because the politics are toxic right now. The governor and legislature suggested that we resign. And we basically took him up on that. And so that is the reason that we resigned. So, I think the best way to put it is: We were on the boat. And we were — we didn't leave the sinking ship. We were thrown off the boat. But we're all good swimmers, so I'm sure we'll all do just fine. And quite frankly, because of the toxic politics, we're not the ones that are — for me, I'm a professor. I'm an expert in electricity market design. And I'm not an expert in delicate politics.

***************

Here's a story from the Texas Monthly on the Texas power grid that also discusses some of the political players:

The Texas Blackout Is the Story of a Disaster Foretold.  Those in charge of Texas’s deregulated power sector were warned again and again that the electric grid was vulnerable.  by Jeffrey Ball