Wow actual infrastructure spending? Awesome!
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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And it isn't even infrastructure week!
It is now!!!
Did you sleep through the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill?
Yes? Am I not allowed to be excited about this?
Look, we can more than one here, m'kay?
$1.5 billion won't actually get you a whole lot.
Better than nothing though. Considering utilities can do this as cap projects, I feel like this money is better spent on bridges/roads.
Who is going to own the infrastructure when it is complete? Outside of like three main utilities, there are no state owned utilities. (Tennessee, Bonneville, and LCRA, I believe).
The projects will enable nearly 1,000 miles of new electric transmission development and 7,100 megawatts of new capacity in Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.
So it's a bailout
the fact that texas' jank ass disconnected grid is getting a dime of federal money is frustrating. they want their own grid, they can have it. if they want federal dollars to fix what they broke then they should be forced to connect and follow the same rules as everyone else.
I think a small portion of Texas is connected to the federal grid. Maybe this would extend that?
There was an article posted today on /c/texas (Lemmy World, I think) about them actually connecting to the national grid.
I guess there actually was a cold day in hell.....
Not a swing state in that list. Don’t they know you only help those that get you elected??
I understand why you would be cynical but don't understand at all how you came to that conclusion
It's paying to rebuild infrastructure where the state government has been neglecting. I'm sure part of it will be to rebuild what's been destroyed by the hurricane.
So bailing out who? Sounds like they're bailing out the people by building a more resilient energy grid, which some might instead define as an investment in the future
As I understand it, Texas republicans pushed to privatize the state's electrical grid, and allow "provider choice" in way that has led to extreme profit-taking by private entities and reduced any investment in infrastructure. This contributed to the extremely high prices that some Texans have been paying in the winter, as well as more frequent and sever outages.
We could consider this a bailout because private entities sucked all the money out of the system, and now the federal government is investing to try and get it into a working state again.
Texas is solidly in the lower half of US states for residential energy costs. You probably read about some people who bought into a "wholesale" energy provider who got fucked during the winter storm in 2021, but that situation involved a very small number of people who made a bad choice and does not generalize to the whole state.
I honestly think the inverse of what you're saying is true...Texas invested billions in the 2000s in transmission capacity between West Texas and where everyone lives in Central and East Texas, opening up West Texas to wind and solar development. Texas is now #1 in wind generating capacity and #2 in solar, after California.
All that mess that happened in 2021 was due to corruption within the Texas Railroad Commission, which had the power to force natural gas electric generating facilities to winterize but did not do so. When the temperature dropped to 4°, the natural gas plants froze and went offline almost all at once, causing an immediate drop in power supply necessitating severe and immediate power cuts statewide to protect the grid from failure. Circuits were reenergized slowly over the following few days, but it stayed really cold for really long. I had personally never been through weather even remotely like that in my 35 years in Texas.
All the other outages you've heard about in Texas were mechanical outages, localized areas where power lines were damaged by weather, like Austin in the '23 ice storm or Houston after Hurricane Beryl this past July. People on here generalize these to "Texas's grid is failing again!", but every state and every nation faces the same challenges with weather-related mechanical outages.
It’s paying to rebuild infrastructure where the state government has been neglecting.
Besides Texas, none of those states listed are population dense or otherwise rich. In fact the low population density may require the cost per subscriber to be significantly higher because more infrastructure is required to bring service to fewer people. This is a perfect example of good federal government spending.
Is your preference that if these regions can't afford to build/maintain this infrastructure they should go without?
It's infrastructure week!