Lessons from the Texas big freeze
Carl Pope, 24 March 2021
The Texas power market caps wholesale prices at an astonishingly high $9,000 per/mwh. When the crisis hit, the computers managing the market price crashed. Regulators then arbitrarily set prices at the peak rate, and left them there for four days, knowing that generators could not provide more power because their facilities were frozen. During the freeze, household daily utility bills of $2,500 and more were incurred by homeowners who had signed up for variable plans, even when for most of the four days they had no power. The City of Denton incurred $300 million in power bills in a week, $2,000 for each of its 15,000 residents.
The power companies maximised their profit from those units that were up and running. By the third week in February, it appeared all the energy companies serving the Texas market had made as much money in 2021 as they had in the previous three years.
“We were able to get super premium prices, that’s going to pay off handsomely like hitting the jackpot,” said Chief Financial Officer Roland Burns of Comstock Resources, a leading Texan energy producer. He later apologised when his remarks hit the headlines. Continue reading “Article: Lessons from the Texas big freeze”
Mary Lovelace Schapiro (born June 19, 1955) served as the 29th Chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). She was appointed by President Barack Obama, unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate, and assumed the Chairship on January 27, 2009. She is the first woman to be the permanent Chair of the SEC.
Gary J. Aguirre is an American 
Kevin M. Warsh was sworn in as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System on February 24, 2006. He left the Board on March 31, 2011. In 1995, Warsh accepted a position with the mergers and acquisitions department at Morgan Stanley & Co. in New York. In 2002, Warsh left his vice president and executive director post at Morgan Stanley & Co. to join the administration for President George W. Bush. He served as special assistant to the president for economic policy and as executive secretary at the National Economic Council. In addition, he advises several companies including serving on the board of directors of United Parcel Service. He graduated from Stanford University(BA), and went on to Harvard Law School and received a law degree in 1995. He also completed coursework in market economics and debt capital markets at Harvard Business School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management.
Jerome H. Powell took office as Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System on February 5, 2018, for a four-year term. Mr. Powell also serves as Chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee. Prior to his appointment to the Board, Powell was a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C. From 1997 through 2005, Powell was a partner at The Carlyle Group. Powell served as an Assistant Secretary and as Under Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury under President George H.W. Bush. Prior to joining the Bush administration, Mr. Powell worked as a lawyer and investment banker in New York City. He received an AB in politics from Princeton University in 1975 and earned a law degree from Georgetown University in 1979. While at Georgetown, he was editor-in-chief of the Georgetown Law Journal.