Hóa đơn tiền điện bỗng dưng tăng vọt, vì sao?

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...What has sent Texas reeling (quay cuồng, lảo đảo, loạng choạng) is not an engineering problem (vấn đề kỹ thuật), nor is it the frozen (tiết đông giá) wind turbines blamed by prominent Republicans. It is a financial structure (cấu trúc tài chính) for power generation (sản xuất điện) that offers no incentives (động cơ kinh tế) to power plant operators (vận hành nhà máy điện) to prepare for winter. In the name of deregulation (phân cấp) and free markets (thị trường tự do), critics say, Texas has created an electric grid that puts an emphasis on cheap prices (giá rẻ) over reliable service (dịch vụ ổn định).

It’s a “Wild West market design (thiết kế thị trường) based only on short-run prices,” said Matt Breidert, a portfolio manager (nhà quản lý danh mục đầu tư) at a firm called Ecofin.

And yet the temporary train wreck of that market Monday and Tuesday has seen the wholesale price of electricity in Houston go from $22 a megawatt-hour to about $9,000. Meanwhile, 4 million Texas households have been without power.

...The widespread failure in Texas and, to a lesser extent, Oklahoma and Louisiana in the face of a winter cold snap shines a light (soi sáng, chiếu rọi) on what some see as the derelict (bị bỏ rơi, không ai nhìn nhận, vô chủ) state of America’s power infrastructure, a mirror reflection of the chaos (hỗn loạn) that struck California last summer.

Edward Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston, said the disinvestment (thoái vốn) in electricity production reminds him of the last years of the Soviet Union, or of the oil sector today in Venezuela.

“They hate it when I say that,” he said.