It passed the Senate and is awaiting action in the House. Senjem sponsored a bill that would provide $115 million in state funds as relief for hard-pressed residents and municipally owned small utilities. They got caught, and the rest of us did, too.” You could use stronger words, but I better not. “I hope they realize they better get their system a little more solid,” he said of Texas. David Senjem (R-Rochester), a former Minnesota legislature majority leader. “I don’t think we even yet truly understand what happened,” said state Sen.
Gas prices in Minnesota rose to 70 times their normal level, as deliveries to the state’s main trading hub dropped by 39 percent. In Minnesota, where the temperature dropped below minus-20 degrees in February and scarcely a single customer lost gas or electricity, state officials are struggling to come up with an equitable solution to a debacle made in Texas. Investigators say they are on the lookout for evidence of price-gouging and market manipulation. In state after state, from the Gulf Coast to the Rockies, from the Ozarks to the shores of Lake Superior, utility regulators have launched investigations into what went wrong, and gas companies have moved to pass on their exceptional costs to customers. Normally, such adjustments to account for winter prices go into effect in September, but Minnesota’s biggest gas utility, Houston-based CenterPoint Energy, says the financial pinch is so great it wants to start billing customers next month - and charging them nearly 9 percent interest until the extraordinary costs are paid off.Īt the same time, the company’s CEO, David Lesar, has been assuring investors that the company has access to plenty of cash and its weather-related costs nationally are not a concern. Minnesota’s biggest gas companies are putting forward plans to recoup their expenses by adding a surcharge to customers’ bills, which the state utility commission would first have to approve. And in a state that eschews regulation, driving energy producers to cut costs as deeply as they can to remain competitive, things went spectacularly wrong the week of Valentine’s Day. The Texas market is so large - second only to California’s - and its natural gas industry is so predominant that when things go wrong there, the impacts can be felt across the country. “It is maddening and outrageous and completely inexcusable that Texas’s lack of sound utility regulation is having this impact on the rest of the country.” “The ineptness and disregard for common-sense utility regulation in Texas makes my blood boil and keeps me up at night,” Katie Sieben, chairwoman of the Minnesota Public Utility Commission, said in an interview. And all the way up by the Canadian border, gas utilities in Minnesota that turned to the daily spot market to meet demand say they had to pay about $800 million more than planned over the course of just five days as the Texas freeze-up pinched off supplies. The spot price of gas jumped 30-fold as far west as Southern California. With its ill-equipped natural gas systems clocked by the cold, Texas’s exports across the Rio Grande froze up and 4.7 million customers in northern Mexico went without electricity - more than in Texas itself. It does not store any personal data.When that big freeze hit Texas in February, the Lone Star State couldn’t help but share its pain. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly.
0 kommentar(er)
