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A friend of mine who works from home was trying to get me to switch to Griddy which offers pass-through market prices at 15 minute increments. Today his electr

• amluto 7y ago
  > We only had 3% capacity left in the system, yet out in the Permian Basin operators are flaring off excess gas. That has nothing to do with the problem (except extremely indirectly via global warming). There isn’t a shortage of fuels — there’s a shortage of generation capacity. No amount of extra natural gas would make the slightest difference.
  • tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    There isn’t a shortage of fuels — there’s a shortage of generation capacity. Or an excess of demand, there are plenty of ways to build houses that lower the need for air conditioning.
    • dillonmckay 7y ago
      Or retrofit existing houses with supplemental geothermal cooling.
      • adrianN 7y ago
        Or add some insulation.
  • benj111 7y ago
    "except extremely indirectly" Not really that indirectly, if there weren't scorching temperatures there wouldn't be a need for extra air con. I'm aware though we can't definitively attribute this heat wave to global warming.
  • mikeash 7y ago
    More fuel would mean lower prices would mean more generators built to take advantage of that.
    • amluto 7y ago
      At the price of peak electricity on a peak day, the cost of fuel is irrelevant. That $9k/MWh peak was about $300/therm. A therm of natural gas, retail, from PG&E is less than $2. The problem here is that the grid more or less guarantees that each customer can draw as much power as they want whenever they want, so there needs to be generation capacity to cover the maximum demand, but that means that, under normal conditions, a good fraction of the capacity is unused. A plant that only runs for a few hours a year needs to charge a lot for those few hours. In theory, demand response can help — the grid can pay certain customers to stop using power at times. Aluminum refineries are the classic example — an aluminum refinery can, in principle, be configured to turn off on demand without much loss other than the production at that time period. So an aluminum refinery that shuts off for eight hours a year generates nearly as much revenue as a refinery that operates continuously, but those eight hours can help the grid during peak load. Actually making this work requires some fancy communication with the grid operator, and this is rather new.
      • mikeash 7y ago
        Thanks for providing concrete numbers! Looks like the effect would be too small to notice even if gas were free.
• reitzensteinm 7y ago
  Today his electric bill was $9, but has he saved money overall? It reads like you're saying you're glad you didn't sign up for the service, but you also paid a ton for power today - just amortized over the average $/kWh your power company charges you. The difference is that you don't have the option to reduce your consumption today to save money. If large numbers of the population were signed up to a market rate service, it would go a long way towards preventing these spikes, and will probably be necessary as we shift to a higher renewable share making the pricing far less stable.
  • reallydontask 7y ago
    > The difference is that you don't have the option to reduce your consumption today to save money. are you saying that in Texas you pay a fix charge for electricity regardless of usage? Assuming that this is not the case, it seems to me that should he/she take the same actions as said friend there would be a reduction to the bill too, just a lot less significant, due to the price being a lot less
  • danmaz74 7y ago
    Don't forget that his friend had to endure a crazy hot day without AC - and still paid much more than usual for electricity. Most people don't want to gamble on these things.
    • reitzensteinm 7y ago
      Running the AC on that day is not expensive due to financial agreements. It's intrinsically a resource intensive thing to do. When you sign up for a fixed rate, it's baked in to the price that you will fire up your AC if you feel like it even when the grid is at capacity and power is extremely expensive. Paying market rate doesn't mean you are blocked from firing up the AC. It might cost you $100 during a heat wave, but you've paid your power company $100 less throughout the year because you haven't been paying in instalments for your peak consumption days. Being able to say fuck it, I'd rather be uncomfortable and save $100 is empowerment, not a burden. In aggregate, those that make this decision would provide a lot of economic benefit. The peak is reduced and whole power plants can be decommissioned.
• hollerith 7y ago
  Forcing Permian Basin operators to "save" the natural gas currently being flared would probably increase the price of electricity in Texas because someone has to pay for the pipelines. If it would decrease the price, then operators could have and would have already increased their profits by building the pipelines to deliver the gas to generating plants. "building": building collectively and with the help of the financial industry. You seem to believe that the oil industry consists of vicious subhumans or something that need to be forced to do the right thing even when the right thing co-incides with their economic self-interest.
  • newguy1234 7y ago
    Problem is pipelines are a regulatory nightmare to build, even in texas. It is getting even harder to build because so much pressure has been focused towards renewables. The northeast has the same issue. Opposition to natural gas pipelines means gas shortage in winter months. They retired their coal plants and now use diesel generators for peak load.
    • hollerith 7y ago
      That is depressing.
    • dillonmckay 7y ago
      Building out pipelines usually involves eminent domain issues. It is a tough sell to have one’s property confiscated by the government on behalf of a for-profit entity, especially if lacking funds for legal counsel.
      • dsfyu404ed 7y ago
        They take land to sell to developers to build strip malls, luxury condos or mixed use buildings (whichever happens to be politically fashionable that minute) often enough that taking it for an actual utility should be no issue. The problem is that you have a bunch of people who are militantly against anything fossil fuel because it's part of their political identity who get their politicians to block any fossil fuel utility project. Sure, fossil fuels aren't good in the long term but only an idiot would deny that having more natgas available cheaply resulting in less power being generated by and fewer people heating their house with oil is a significant improvement over the status quo.
• SwellJoe 7y ago
  You know what's worse than the gas flare offs? Nearly 100% of solar power, of which there is a tremendous amount in Texas in the summer, is going to waste. Most of the wind, of which there's a lot in the plains of west Texas and the hills of central Texas, is also wasted. The only reason Texas isn't producing nearly 100% of its power from renewable sources today is because the oil and gas industry has been coddled and protected and catered to by the state government for decades, at the expense of everyone who isn't employed by the oil and gas industry (which, admittedly, is a lot of people in Texas).
  • Cthulhu_ 7y ago
    So why is said oil and gas industry not investing in solar power themselves? I mean they will be left behind at some point if they don't catch up now. And whatever happened to the free market? If an investor wants to plop down a solar collector farm somewhere in Texas' vast lands, what's stopping him? The government?
    • pjc50 7y ago
      Permitting is one thing: https://openei.org/wiki/RAPID/Solar/Texas https://openei.org/wiki/RAPID/Solar/Texas Access to the wholesale electricity market is another.
    • iambateman 7y ago
      Ghengis Khan doesn’t look around at his pillaged kingdom and think: “i guess this is enough, maybe we should establish more competition to enhance our long-term success as a community.” No. He keeps chewing on brisket until someone else forces the issue.
      • jumbopapa 7y ago
        I don't believe these huge oil/gas companies are this naive. If just one makes the plunge and has success then all the others would have to follow. I don't think any of these oil companies are a Kodak.
• pjc50 7y ago
  Gas flaring needs to be banned or at least very heavily penalized as the #1 priority of western environmentalists everywhere. Yet everyone seems to be caring about straws. I kind of want to make a video of holding up a plastic straw next to a hundred-foot flare to ask people which is the bigger problem. Not all of the flaring is in remote areas, either: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-49335545 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-4...
  • mcv 7y ago
    It's a practice that has always baffled me. Why burn off fossil fuels for no gain at all? It's bafflingly wasteful. Plastic waste is also an issue (not sure if straws are really the biggest issue there), but it shouldn't be hard to tackle both.
    • SuoDuanDao 7y ago
      Flaring gas normalizes the pressure inside a mixed well, allowing oil to be pumped at atmospheric pressure. That's a much cheaper way of getting to the oil than any of the alternatives (which basically require working with a high pressure right at the wellhead, a very dangerous practice). As for why the companies don't just harvest the gas first then get the oil, gas is harder to transport. The places I worked with flare stacks were well off the beaten path, oil was stored in 400 barrel tanks and brought out with trucks. There's no such system for gas, hence why it's considered a nuisance by a lot of drillers.
      • jacobush 7y ago
        It is a nuisance - it should be fixed by making it mandatory to harvest it.
        • r-bryan 7y ago
          Actually, just leave it all in the ground.
      • 7y ago
• ChuckMcM 7y ago
  For what its worth, the rolling blackouts in California resulted in the state permitting a bunch of new plants fairly quickly. With luck that will happen in Texas.
  • PhantomGremlin 7y ago
    For what its worth, Kenny Boy and Skilling and Fastow had a lot to do with those blackouts. Wikipedia claims: These blackouts occurred as a result of a poorly designed market system that was manipulated by traders and marketers, as well as from poor state management and regulatory oversight. Subsequently, Enron traders were revealed as intentionally encouraging the removal of power from the market during California's energy crisis by encouraging suppliers to shut down plants to perform unnecessary maintenance Sadly, Kenny never did any time and Skilling and Fastow are both now out of jail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron#California's_deregulation_and_subsequent_energy_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron#California's_deregulatio...
• CalRobert 7y ago
  " he turned off literally everything except his fridge. He even turned off his hot water heater." Which is exactly what you want people to do when a resource is scarce. Price signals work. Hopefully his next step is to consider solar water heating. It's summer in Texas FFS.
  • dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    $9/day after doing all that is still insane. This is not NYC or SF where that is the cost of a bagel. Price signals may work but at the end of the day utilities need to be cheap enough that the poor can mostly use them without thinking twice. The elderly can't just turn off their A/C in high heat.
    • sokoloff 7y ago
      If we had an abundance of low environmentally impacting energy, energy would be cheap enough that the poor could use it without caring. That's not the world we live in (at least not yet).
    • dragonwriter 7y ago
      > Price signals may work but at the end of the day utilities need to be cheap enough that the poor can mostly use them without thinking twice. No, utilities need to be subsidized for the poor (perhaps through s general subsidy, or otherwise through a utility-specific one) and perhaps also those somewhat less poor with special needs so that they can use what is essential without undue hardship; the prices of utilities for the rich don't need to be low enough that the poor could pay them without thought.
      • perl4ever 7y ago
        I don't think utilities need to be subsidized for anyone. There's a difference between that and just giving people money. If I have $X extra a month in income, and electricity or fuel is really expensive, then I still make choices based on the relative price of those things versus other goods. But if I am given a subsidy of $X specifically for energy, then that seems like a terrible idea. Just because it's the same amount of money doesn't mean it has the same effect on my choices and the environment.
• jacobkranz 7y ago
  I was one of the first Griddy engineers (though I’m no longer there). We would have people call & complain when the cost for a day was much less & they had AC blasting. I wonder how the customer support reps are dealing with all of this.
  • RandomBacon 7y ago
    I just keep switching companies for the lowest, fixed-rate, new customer plans. It's faster to do that than to go on the phone and complain or ask for a "discount" (where you would still be paying more). (I don't know about other states, but this is extremely easy to do in Texas.)
  • abathur 7y ago
    Can't answer the small question, but they did send out an email that they're going to tighten their marketing budget for a bit and comp/refund everyone's $9.99 membership fee for the month. Griddy's communication efforts have generally grown increasingly proactive since we joined in June 2017, and they have been very proactive over the past ~10 days. They sent informational emails on the 6th, 9th, 12th, 13th, and 14th notifying us about upcoming high-price/demand periods, what hours things are expected to spike, and providing suggestions for avoiding/mitigating energy use.
    • abathur 7y ago
      And another a few minutes ago for the 15th :)
• baldeagle 7y ago
  Another annoying thing is that flaring pollutes more than running a peaker. Literally win/win.
• monkeynotes 7y ago
  I am confused, are some consumers actually paying $90.00 per kw/h?
  • tialaramex 7y ago
    That would be $9.00 per kWh, not "$90.00 per kw/h" which is both the wrong amount and the wrong way to write the unit. And yes, some cosumers may have chosen to be billed at spot prices like this, though probably not very many, and of course since it's spot pricing they were charged it back then, not now when you're writing this and the wholesale price is more normal.
  • abathur 7y ago
    The Griddy rate was pegged at $8.99/kwh for about an hour and 15 minutes.
• raverbashing 7y ago
  > But how do you sell the idea of investment to flatten energy prices in an unregulated market? It seems you sell it as the article is saying: at peak times you'll be selling it at $9 (ok maybe less) but that might be enough to justify the investment.
  • tialaramex 7y ago
    Indeed. This is why Dinorwig (the Welsh power station) is profitable. When electricity is cheap they buy it, and put electricity in and it pumps water up to an artificial lake, when prices rise they stop, and when the price rises still further that's their cue to drop water from the lake back through the system to make electricity for sale. You can do the maths "Hmm, we need to make £2 per MWh of electricity at least once per day for this business to make sense" and look at price charts and say "Yup, that's feasible, today we will buy any time it's below £30 until we're full and we'll sell any time it's above £35 until we're empty" and make plenty of money. If only conveniently located mountain lakes were more common we'd probably have these everywhere. The price decisions are tricky though, imagine you decide you should sell for £40 today, and then the wind just doesn't stop blowing at sea and offshore wind turbines (which will sell for any price at any time since their power is basically free) keep the price below £38 all day. You end the day with zero income. Not a game for people with limited capital reserves. Or you decide to buy once it falls below £40 on another day, but then every AC unit in the country is running non-stop and the cloud sit, unmoving but blocking the sun, prices sit above £50 all day. Again no income. It wasn't built to make a profit, the government built it because it's a Black Start facility, ie it's one way to "boot up" the electricity grid if it fails and you need to start over from no electricity. But now it's privately owned by a French corporation and increasing use of renewables means more minute-by-minute price fluctuations to profit from.
• abathur 7y ago
  Late to the thread, but I'm also a Griddy customer in Houston and wanted to put an asterisk on this. I'm not sure how your friend knows his rate yet. The Griddy interface takes 24-48 hours to update/integrate the smart meter data for a day. It's possible your friend's data integrates faster than hours, but we still see no summary for Tuesday usage. That said, the charged rate did max out (I think this is a regulatory cap) at around $8.99/kwh for a little over an hour yesterday (and was over $2/kwh for a few hours). I suspect there's been a miscommunication here? For additional context, Griddy rates update every 5 minutes and just include the base power component (delivery/tax/etc. are roughly fixed per kwh).
  • technofiend 7y ago
    The linked article was for Monday, as was my friend's power bill. So you're right - I was off by a day when I posted on Tuesday "Today his power bill was $9." He was actually complaining to me about the day prior, Monday August 12th. In the interest of full disclosure when he texted me he said "$9 power bill" but his screen cap from Griddy which he sent later was only $8.07. I think he was a little cranky when he sent the first text. I can upload the screen cap if you want to see it? Edit: BTW he just texted me: Tuesday's power bill was $14.65.
    • abathur 7y ago
      No worries. Just seemed like a disjunct somewhere and wanted to make sure to clarify how this model works since very few people have direct experience. He's probably even crankier today :) For additional context for others, our energy cost (not including other costs) for Monday were $1.24 for 14.4 kWh (88c for .3 kWh during the spike between 1pm and 4pm). It looks like our Tuesday records showed up between my original post and now. We paid $3.18 for 15 kWh ($2.83 of that between 1-6pm).
      • technofiend 7y ago
        See my edit above. Tuesday's power bill was $14.65 and of that $10 was during a three hour period where usage was less than 1 kwh per hour.