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$8,162 Power Bill? Texas’ Winter Storm Hell Only Gets Worse
- ratsmack 6y agoI wonder how many people realized that their bill could reach those numbers. There should be cap on the prices to prevent this type of gouging, or some kind of price leveling state wide to distribute the pain.
- kevin_b_er 6y agoThere was a cap and it was removed mid-storm: https://thetexan.news/texas-utility-regulator-increased-electricity-prices-during-blackouts-to-accurately-reflect-market-conditions/ https://thetexan.news/texas-utility-regulator-increased-elec...
- bdcravens 6y agoThis wasn't the first time Griddy has had this issue, but it's the worst. Aside from Griddy, no one really cared because it was always the retail electric providers who had to eat the cost. On Saturday, Griddy sent out emails basically telling all of their customers they should leave their service (I was a Griddy customer; I switched, but not before running up $900 of charges over the weekend)
- wmf 6y agoThere should be cap on the prices to prevent this type of gouging, or some kind of price leveling state wide to distribute the pain. This is what normal utilities do. A few customers decided to opt out of the normal system and play the electricity market and now they're reaping the results. If you gamble on GameStop stock, you lose money. If you gamble your house's power on Griddy, you lose money.
- eqvinox 6y agoNo, normal utilities have prices being updated maybe once a year. There's a middle option of spot prices with a cap (as a service). Unfortunately, Griddy is not that option, it's spot prices without a cap (by Griddy itself). But it seems that the cap (as regulation) was also removed during this storm, which honestly none of these customers could have expected. When they signed up for Griddy, a legal cap was indeed in place.
- ehutch79 6y agoA lot of politicians getting elected feel like (all) regulation is evil, and stands in the way of business profits. These large power bills are a feature not a bug, as the customers can simply turn off the things using the power.
- MattGaiser 6y agoThey also deliberately selected to be exposed to the rate market. Griddy is a unique provider in that.
- tampatrev 6y agoYou should just be able to buy energy futures and use those that pay your bill.
- gambiting 6y agoI can only imagine that vast majority of Texans would fight tooth and nail against any kind of regulation as government meddling. They overwhelmingly want to be free of restrictions and regulations to have "freedom" to enter any shitty contract they can. So, there you go you entered a contract where your price is matched to the wholesale price? That's what you get. I don't feel even a shred of sympathy, because I know fully well that any attempts to help would be met with outright aggression and ridicule.
- IntelMiner 6y agoI don't think that's fair to the vast majority of Texans suffering You're asking the majority of a state of 29 million people to be as informed as the lobbyists for the electricity markets. To understand the pitfalls of privatizing and regulating an asset that is by its very nature, a monopoly (electrical distribution)
- pram 6y agoYou realize Griddy is pretty exceptional right. My power is provided by a publicly owned utility, in Texas! If anyone met your 'help' with aggression and ridicule it's probably because you come off as a giant asshole lol
- givehimagun 6y agoYeah - explain deregulation to my 70 year old neighbor who didn't know how to light her fireplace and asks me questions about how Netflix works. You're right - every single Texan wants freedom and doesn't want help. As an aside, have you ever been to Texas or met many Texans?
- gambiting 6y agoTexans consistently vote for politicians who protect the rights of corporations over the rights of people and who are against most types of regulation. So your 70 year old neighbor should ask them why she doesn't have heat, not a random stranger on the internet.
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- whoknew1122 6y agoTexas has a deregulated market, so there's a wide variety of pricing structures. When I lived in central Texas, I had an electric provider who was month-to-month and updated prices probably once a year. I currently live North Texas and have a 3 year contract with an electric provider at a fixed rate that was established when the contract was signed. And then there's people using Griddy, which uses current market prices. It's like daytrading, but for something you can't live without.
- svnpenn 6y agoDoes someone have a mirror? That garbage website has some anti-adblock malware it seems
- eesmith 6y agoTry using 'links', that is, a text mode browser - no problems at all. Indeed, it's a very clean layout.
- andreareina 6y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20210219005015/https://www.thedailybeast.com/dollar5152-power-bill-texas-winter-storm-hell-only-gets-worse https://web.archive.org/web/20210219005015/https://www.theda...
- bdcravens 6y agoI'm in Houston. I was using Griddy, saving about $50-100 a month with their model. Through Monday, however, my bill was $1200 for the month, with $900 of that on Saturday and Sunday. (I did switch to a standard provider this week)
- eigenvector 6y agoFTA: > Exacerbating and prolonging this sticker shock is a decision on Tuesday by the state’s Power Utility Commission, which regulates the nonprofit ERCOT’s operations. The order from the gubernatorially appointed PUC asserted that, even with a hike coinciding with cold weather and increased heating use, ERCOT had been undercharging consumers for the cost of energy and directed it to raise its rates. Not really, ERCOT does not have anything to do with consumer energy rates, only the wholesale market. The vast majority of consumers buy energy through retail providers that in some way isolate them from spikes in wholesale pricing. A handful willingly decided to buy at spot prices through providers like Griddy, and they are feeling the consequences. I don't know what to say, really. If you decide to play at being an electricity trader with your home energy bill, there is no way you are going to win in the long term. You can't contract to buy a commodity at the spot price then ask to be bailed out when you end up on the wrong side of the trade.
- LockAndLol 6y agoI'd rather see them bailed out than some greedy trader on wall street or a banker.
- UncleMeat 6y agoWhat percentage of people do you think had any idea of the maximum risk they were taking on? I get emails from my power provider on occasion asking me to opt-in to some program that charges based on usage rather than at a fixed rate. The email basically just says "most people see lower rates" and "use less power at peak times to save money" and says precisely nothing about tail risk. Could my bill go up 100x? I would have no idea. Yes, buying using the wholesale price incurs risk. But these programs aren't marketed like short selling or options trading - risky decisions for professionals. They are marketed as cost savings measures.
- macNchz 6y agoI can’t speak to Griddy or their marketing, but the here in NY the market for alternate provider “ESCOs” seems to have attracted some really shady players. Their sales tactics range from a little deceptive to outright fraudulent, with door to door and telemarketing sales people going so far as to pretend to be ConEdison employees to get your account number and process the provider change behind the scenes. I see the Griddy homepage has a graphic showing that they beat the other providers on price 96% of the time...how many of their customers knew at signup time just how bad it could get 4% of the time?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gbronner 6y agoCurious how griddy customers behaved vs other customers. This morning so be a tool to manage the grid going forward
- praseodym 6y agoThe second example in the article shows someone using 5000 kWh in January of this year alone — how does one household reasonably use that amount of electricity? In The Netherlands and Germany the average is around 3500 kWh per household _per year_.
- Havoc 6y agoYou can see the same effect in the /r/homelab subreddit - Europeans and Americans are picking very different hardware. US side it's usually ancient enterprise gear that businesses have dropped because of the insane power requirements
- vlovich123 6y agoThe average home in Texas uses 1,176 kWh a month, or 14,112 kWh a year, based on EIA data As for using that much in one month and it being January (cold snap was in February, no?), I don’t know. Housing that’s not properly insulated and running a bunch of space heaters 24/7 instead of putting on warmer clothes and using central heating. Or Bitcoin mining. Edit: Never mind. Since it lists him as a contractor, it’s possible he uses a bunch of power tools out of his place (might not even be his personal home but a business).
- wjnc 6y agoDon't forget to convert the gas into MJ / kWh with an appropriate conversion factor. When I calculated total energy use for my household I was somewhat amazed at how much energy gas holds.
- eqvinox 6y agoThere's no gas involved in any of these numbers. 3500 kWh/year is a typical number for pure electricity in Germany.
- wjnc 6y agoDon't Americans use electric heat pumps / air-conditioning units for cooling and heating, while Europeans more often heat on natural gas? My point is you need to look at the per capita energy use in comparable terms (MJ or BTU/cap perhaps with CO2 MT/cap next to that). To put it in perspective. In the last month my household of 5 in NL used about 400 kWh of electricity and 400 m3 of gas. Those 400 m3 calculate to about 5 MWh (!) of electrical energy (Dutch gas is about 35 MJ per m3ans my heater is 95% efficient if used optimally). Since I expect Texans to mostly have electrical HVAC mostly for cooling ... My house is very inefficient in comparison. US: 49% gas, 34% electrical [1] NL: 90%+ gas [2] [1] https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/heat-and-cool/home-heating-systems https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/heat-and-cool/home-heatin... [2] https://www.milieucentraal.nl/energie-besparen/aardgasvrij-wonen/wonen-zonder-aardgas/ https://www.milieucentraal.nl/energie-besparen/aardgasvrij-w...
- spacemanmatt 6y agoThis is part and parcel of why I think California companies considering a move to Texas for the "great business environment" are in for a bitter disappointment.
- spacemanmatt 6y agoI mean, I'm sure the lack of public parks, poor education system, and some other regulatory failures on par with ERCOT are at least as attractive as a week without electricity or water.