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Texas is shockingly green when it comes to power. The windmills have frozen and it is the winter when there isn't as much sun. Most people are on a contract wit
by mimikatz 6y ago
Texas is shockingly green when it comes to power. The windmills have frozen and it is the winter when there isn't as much sun. Most people are on a contract with fixed pricing, but some startups like Griddy are hurting people's wallets. We will likely see some retail electric company bankrupcies. Some of the electric providers are paying customers to move to someone else on Monday.
The Joke is all the Californians who immigrated brought the blackouts with them.
- ryanmarsh 6y ago>We will likely see some retail electric company bankrupcies. REP's go bankrupt all the time, especially when the weather gets funny. As WallStreetsBets says, "Sir, this is a casino".
- nickysielicki 6y agoGriddy literally emailed every customer yesterday and told them to switch providers asap.
- shiftpgdn 6y agoYep. I was on track for a $5000 electric bill at the end of the week. I got switched over yesterday. Still going to be painful but not horrible.
- slater 6y ago$5k?!?!? How?!
- ev1 6y ago$0.05 to $0.10/kWh seems like normal pricing. Average US house uses ~1100-1200 kWh (I don't actually know this, based on googling, assuming most places in Texas are standalone houses) per month. If prices are $3000-9000 per MW, then ~40 to 60 kWh/day (let's be generous, people are explicitly turning on heat for this extreme cold) for a week... Even $2/kWh (which was exceeded days ago) would demolish peoples' budgets.
- maxerickson 6y agoI think most people are on fixed prices though. The supplier gets a big mark up over the wholesale cost and then is expected to have a plan to deal with situations like this.
- rstupek 6y agoGriddy is a different provider which gives you grid prices for power
- maxerickson 6y agoYeah, this is the answer to slater's question, that some people have signed up for exposure to wholesale prices.
- ev1 6y agogriddy's twitter is full of people angrily demanding refunds because "i signed up for cheaper rates and it's been cheaper til now why am i paying higher rates??? this is a scammer"
- phonebanshee 6y agoThose prices are far below normal prices. Normal is 28-50 cents in places like San Diego (https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/energy-green/story/2020-04-16/cpuc-vote-on-removing-seasonal-residential-tiered-rates https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/energy-green/s...).
- shiftpgdn 6y agoIn Texas griddy exposes you to real time spot pricing. I was frequently getting paid to use electricity at night due to excess generation by wind. As an electric car owner this was fantastic as I frequently got paid to recharge my car. My average delivered rate before this week was 7c/kwh all in.
- shiftpgdn 6y agoMy house normally uses 70kwh/day. We have an electric heater and with this cold weather we were on track to use 150-200kwh day. At $5/kwh for 5 days of 200kwh due to the cold puts me at $5,000.
- pilom 6y agoHoly cow! How in the world do you use that much? My old house in Colorado would use ~350kwh/month. Swap out that electric heater for a heat pump asap!
- shiftpgdn 6y agoBig house (3700sqft or so), tall ceilings, four people working/schooling from home and an electric car as the primary family car. In 2019 I literally did not turn the heater on a single time, I don't think the investment in a heat pump would be worth it.
- lgats 6y agoHeat pump systems can sometimes be an upgrade to standard air conditioning systems
- dzhiurgis 6y agoDoes your AC has not heating function (I assume everyone in Texas has AC)?
- toast0 6y agoI'm guessing most Texas AC systems don't have a reversing valve, and a defrost system and all the other goodies you need to run it for heat. It adds to the equipment cost when many years heat isn't needed, and if the temperatures are 10F, you'd still likely need other heat sources.
- dzhiurgis 6y ago> a defrost system What does a defrost system includes? My dad manages a place where defrost system on one of the devices broke. Technician replaced something and hence it was fixed. IIRC it was temperature sensor. All defrost system does is periodically warms up the outside grill basically. It used to get stuck at -15C or so.
- conductr 6y agoI’ve been half ignoring them because they tend to cry wolf with the high price emails. But this is no joke, I checked current rate which is $9.01/kWh. I immediately switched back to my old provider.
- rstupek 6y agoThey emailed, sent a phone notification and called their customers to tell them to switch
- dehrmann 6y agoI hope they get some sort of a surcharge for this. Part of what you pay for with a big utility is for them to eat weird price fluctuations. Getting grid pricing just when it's convenient is cheating the system.
- mbreese 6y agoProbably not a surcharge, but maybe a minimum contract length? I don’t know if that’s possible (legally). But, I imagine that a utility would want to make sure that a customer who switched providers to avoid these wholesale prices would want to ensure that the customer would stick around long enough to make sense financially.
- rstupek 6y agoThe contract lengths yield different prices. griddy has referral recommendations for several 1 month contracts through different providers until prices stabilize
- DavidPeiffer 6y agoIt sounds like Texas has a substantially different market than most of the rest of the country, by typically utilities are heavily regulated. I would be curious how the other market players react to this (perhaps requesting more regulation). It kinda feels like someone who could have gotten insurance but declined getting coverage until after learning they have cancer. That's certainly not the spirit of how insurance is supposed to work (spreading tail-end risk across a pool of people), and if everyone acted that way, it would be far from sustainable. As a whole people are poor at assessing low probability risks. Low probability high cost risks pose a big threat. Letting people get spot pricing may help the market be more efficient, but considering many people would struggle to pay a $200 unexpected bill, it does feel odd to let everyone do spot pricing if they want. For many people, even having one bill that was double normal would financial headaches, much less 10x! Giving consumers spot pricing feels like having everyday people selling naked call options. It may work fine for a really long time, but when the strategy blows up, it has unlimited liability potential.
- MattGaiser 6y agoGriddy is basically a variable price for power? I checked their website, but it wasn't completely clear on that point (maybe because I don't understand Texas electrical billing).
- rstupek 6y agoYes you pay a monthly fee and get the grid price. Typically this is a great deal but when these surges happen it isn't
- maxerickson 6y agoYeah, they pass through the wholesale prices. Most providers do some work to offer fixed retail prices (gaining when wholesale is cheap, losing when it's expensive). Most markets in the US have some sort of system for matching supply and demand, often a wholesale market. https://www.epa.gov/greenpower/us-electricity-grid-markets https://www.epa.gov/greenpower/us-electricity-grid-markets has a picture of the various wholesale markets.
- gok 6y ago> windmills Wind turbines! :)
- rootsudo 6y ago"The Joke is all the Californians who immigrated brought the blackouts with them. " Ouch, yet wow.
- Rapzid 6y agoJust to add some numbers; we(Texas) have over 31,000MW of installed wind energy capacity. No other state comes close. Probably a lot of things people find shocking about Texas when compared to its reputation lol.
- Daho0n 6y agoTexas is the state with the most wind energy in the US? 42,933km2 Denmark has 6GW wind energy capacity and 695,662km2 Texas has 31GW. That doesn't sound very impressive.
- chrisrogers 6y agoTexas' population is 29 million. Denmark's is 5.8 million. So the scale is remarkably equivalent.
- nyokodo 6y agoTexas has 5X the population of Denmark and 5X the wind energy generation. That doesn’t sound like a great justification for your smug comment. Also, that is current generation as the rate of increase of wind and solar appears to far outstrip Denmark on a per capita basis. If the WSJ is reliable, Texas is supposed to add an additional ~17GW of solar by 2023, reaching 21GW![1] If they reach that it’d beat Denmark’s 2030 goal by 23% and 7 years on a per capita basis.[2] 1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/solar-power-booms-in-texas-11606579200 https://www.wsj.com/articles/solar-power-booms-in-texas-1160... 2. https://um.dk/en/news/newsdisplaypage/?newsid=25147b44-3dce-4647-8788-ad9243c22df2 https://um.dk/en/news/newsdisplaypage/?newsid=25147b44-3dce-...
- tolien 6y agoPer capita doesn't seem like the most useful measure here unless you're expecting people to spin the turbines by hand. Texas has (by GP's numbers) 16 times the land area and 2.5x the annual sunshine hours [1,2] (given Texas's proximity to the equator relative to Denmark, I'd be shocked if those hours didn't confer significantly more power too) but "only" 5x the generation? Edit: Of course, it's 5x the wind power. For solar power in Texas and Denmark the difference is about 4x - 4,324.3 versus 1,079 MW [3, 4] so the point stands that Texas still has a way to go relative to the resources available to them. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_sunshine_duration#North_and_Central_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_sunshine_dur... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark#Climate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark#Climate 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Denmark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Denmark 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Texas
- stjohnswarts 6y agojust one nit to pick, it's wind turbines, not windmills. :)
- v64 6y ago> Some of the electric providers are paying customers to move to someone else on Monday. I'm on a fixed rate plan and my provider just offered me $150 to change, but I had to do it by tomorrow and the rates available now aren't close to what I'm currently at.
- roenxi 6y agoIt'll be interesting, when the dust settles, to see how this event squares away with the regulator's risk modelling. My initial impression is there is a correlation between extreme power demand and renewable energy being unavailable that would not have been present for a nuclear or fossil fuel based system.
- eigenvector 6y agoERCOT is pretty good about releasing their event analysis after the fact. I think the main issue with renewables is not inherent unreliability but that grid operators do not understand the potential contingencies as well as with conventional generation sources. SPP has put out some good analyzes of recent max generation events there involving large amounts of wind being unavailable in cold snaps. It turns out no one at SPP bothered to ask wind turbine owners what temperatures they were capable of operating in and some wind operators didn't buy the cold weather package for turbines despite installing them in the Midwest. So generation availability forecasting didn't take into account the real capabilities of generators - a clear failure in operational planning. This is more of a regulatory issue than a technical one. The machines can operate at -40 C, but someone has to actually spec that functionality and ensure that the associated subcomponents (heaters etc) are properly maintained. There is a new NERC reliability standard in the drafting stage for this.
- a9h74j 6y agoSomewhat off topic, but are regulators also considering mandating Basalt rebar in wind tower foundations, prohibiting steel rebar? I don't know what the re-use story is for foundation plus tower, but it seems to me a bad idea to start with the assumption of rusting out the foundations.
- eigenvector 6y agoI haven't heard of that here in North America, but I'll add that I'm not up to speed on global developments. In general, wind turbine foundations are considered to have a fixed lifespan of 25-30 years. If re-powering occurs at end of life, it may be with a larger turbine that requires a new foundation anyway, so not much thought is given to foundation re-use.
- jeffbee 6y agoTexas fuels mix in 2019 was 20% coal, 47% natural gas. That's shocking, yes, but not green. California's mix is 3% coal (2019 figures; in 2021 it is zero) and 34% natural gas, for comparison.
- s1artibartfast 6y agoCan you share your source? I wonder if you are looking at production or consumption numbers. California is the largest energy importer in the USA (25%) and my understanding is that the number 1 source for this power is coal and natural gas in Arizona and Utah.
- jeffbee 6y agoI'm looking at this source for California which includes imports. The main source of error is "unspecified" open market imports, but even if 100% of that is from fossil fuels, which seems unlikely, the worst-case error is another 7% of the total. https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/2019-total-system-electric-generation https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo... Your understanding sounds completely fictional to me. Where did you come to believe that the primary source of imported power is Utah coal?
- s1artibartfast 6y agoI didn't say Utah coal specifically. I said the leading sources were coal and natural gas from Arizona and Utah. I based this on theEIA. [1] >In 2019, California’s net electricity imports were the largest in the country at 70.8 million megawatthours (MWh), or 25% of the state’s total electricity supply ... California utilities partly own and import power from several power plants in Arizona and Utah. Arizona is ~75% coal and natural gas [2] Utah is ~80% and natural gas [3] Looking at your link [4], 70% of California imports are "non-renewable and unspecified" and 75% of "non-renewable and unspecified" comes from the southwest (e.g. Arizona and Utah) I think this brings us to the same conclusion that the number 1 source for imported electricity is coal and natural gas in Arizona and Utah. You are saying that a worst case for CA power is being 3-10% coal. I am talking about the worst case for CA imported power (which happens to be up to 37% coal) [1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46156#:~:text=In%202019%2C%20California's%20net%20electricity,the%20state's%20total%20electricity%20supply.&text=California%20utilities%20partly%20own%20and,plants%20in%20Arizona%20and%20Utah https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46156#:~:tex.... [2] https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=AZ#tabs-4 https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=AZ#tabs-4 [3] https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=UT#tabs-4 https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=UT#tabs-4 [4] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/2019-total-system-electric-generation https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
- pickle-wizard 6y agoI was on Griddy for about 9 months a couple of years ago. Until one very hot August, when the wholesale price hit $10/kWh in the afternoon. My power bill for one day was $130. I didn't even wait till the end of the month. I switched back to my old power company that afternoon. Thankfully they were able to switch me back the next morning.
- Scoundreller 6y agoTrick is to set up a couple transfer switches and make a deal with your neighbour on a fixed rate plan. Could do it just for the air conditioner and gain most of the savings. We’re you able to set up anything interesting to take advantage of ebbs and flows in rates?
- pickle-wizard 6y agoNo I never did. Griddy didn't have an API by the time I left. I had thought about setting up something to scrap the data from ERCOT's page, but decided it wasn't worth the effort.