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I'm in Texas, and lost power for > 72hrs. I'm not on a wholesale rate plan, but if I was, you can bet your sweet ass that I would be A. monitoring the wholesal
by fastball 6y ago
I'm in Texas, and lost power for > 72hrs.
I'm not on a wholesale rate plan, but if I was, you can bet your sweet ass that I would be A. monitoring the wholesale price B. switching off my main breaker the moment the price went above $X.
As such, don't really agree with the conclusion of the article. We mandate having car insurance not because we care if you can't afford to fix your car when you wreck it, but rather because if you crash into someone else we don't want you to dodge paying for what you've done to them.
Electricity is entirely a you thing. Your neighbor/society doesn't get hurt if you use Griddy with uncapped rates, only you do (and as pointed out above, you can avoid this if you're smart). Yes people will get burned, but I don't want to live in a society that tries to prevent people from ever making personal mistakes – mostly because such attempts usually don't succeed, while also curtailing my freedom in the process. And just to reiterate, this doesn't apply if there are negative externalities that affect others.
- war1025 6y ago> if I was, you can bet your sweet ass that I would be A. monitoring the wholesale price B. switching off my main breaker the moment the price went above $X. Unfortunately, we can't really count on people being at all competent like that. If I was in Texas this past week, you can bet that I would have monitored my lack of heat and shut off my water and drained the pipes in my house. Instead, there is an astronomical amount of water damage from burst pipes now. People who haven't considered or dealt with the worst case scenario will always be caught off guard. That's just the nature of it.
- shiftpgdn 6y agoI am/was a griddy customer. What all of these news stories do not mention is Griddy called literally every single customer and told them to close their accounts because of the upcoming energy shortage.
- war1025 6y agoThat seems quite upstanding of them and changes the dynamics of the situation quite a bit in my opinion.
- maxerickson 6y agoThey anticipated defaults and pushed customers to switch to providers of last resort that are obligated to sell electricity at regulated retail rates.
- sudosysgen 6y agoHow many of them didn't get call because, you know, no electricity?
- molticrystal 6y ago> A. monitoring the wholesale price Unless the price is available through another method like radio, from the meter, or over the powerline, be sure to be using a satellite link in case mobile data and local internet goes out before the power does. And have some type of contingency if their website goes down for maintenance or due to a disaster.
- ubercow13 6y agoIf a large number of people are allowed to trade electricity in the wholesale market and end up with bills they can’t pay, that’s not just a you problem, it’s now a structural one. At least for Griddy, and if they go bankrupt maybe for the electricity grid market itself. Kind of like how people’s unaffordable mortgages weren’t just a ‘them’ problem in the financial crash. Some people are asking for the state to bail out people with these bills now. In other words, people liked the ‘freedom’ to benefit from cheaper wholesale prices, but when the market moves against them, the downside risk will be socialised.
- fastball 6y agoDoesn’t really seem like a reasonable comparison. If someone doesn’t pay their bills you stop giving them electricity. This is not anywhere close to what happened with the 2008 crisis. And yes, that’s the point. I don’t want the state to socialize losses, and I don’t want them to say I can’t buy electricity from a wholesaler. People should live with their decisions.
- khuey 6y agoElectricity bills are post-paid. There's an inherent credit mechanism.
- cool_dude85 6y agoPre-paid plans are relatively common around the world and becoming more so in the US. Much of that is due to utility companies requiring quite large deposits that they will forgo if you are pre-paid.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- fastball 6y agoEven so that's only a month of lag time. Housing crisis was an entirely different scale and set of problems.
- ggm 6y ago> A. monitoring the wholesale price B. switching off my main breaker the moment the price went above $X. A was meant to be done by "smart" meters but they forgot to package it in a way which let us do demand reduction, or even be told. It was packaged to the suppliers benefit, not the consumer (here in OZ) B you do know, this carries risks? Sure, not enormous ones, but frequent interruption of supply is not inherently safer than turning things off at the wall, nicely. CBs are good, but everything mechanical has a lifetime. The more you use it, the shorter it is, sometimes. Especially for mechanical things, when they're physically cold.
- megablast 6y agoHow often do you monitor it?? Third party insurance exists.
- eigenvector 6y agoA significant gap in culture between the United States and many other developed countries is the idea that there can ever be an "entirely you thing". Even your own health and well-being is not entirely you. Whatever you do to yourself has ripple effects on society. You go without health insurance, but when you fall ill or die prematurely, who takes care of your dependants? Or more to the point, you sign up for Griddy and turn off your main breaker because the price went too high, then your pipes freeze and damage neighbouring properties or even worse, you freeze to death or die from carbon monoxide poisoning. No man is truly an island.
- fastball 6y agoNo man is an island, but you need to draw the line somewhere. The consequences of all bad decisions can't be socialized. Also worth pointing out that dying is still a "you" problem. Obviously I'd prefer it if people didn't die, but again, if you're actually dying the solution is to switch your power back on and only use it for essentials and take the hit. Debts can be paid off, and should be. Again, I was straight up without power for > 72hrs. I would've actually enjoyed the choice to pay an insane rate for some electricity rather than not having a choice at all.
- taeric 6y agoA problem with this is most places have drawn the line in a much better place than you are describing. Did other places have outages? Yeah. They also had more severe weather. With fewer deaths, it seems.
- fastball 6y agoI think you're conflating two different things. You prevent situations like this from happening by ruggedizing the Texas Interconnection. That doesn't have anything to do with allowing people to pay wholesale rates for electricity and holding them to such when the prices fluctuate.
- taeric 6y ago
- anarazel 6y agoHow can an individual understand and influence the risk preparedness of the whole grid? It's one thing to pay 3-4x for a day or be uncomfortably but safely warm. But a whole other thing to have costs increased by several orders of magnitude or alternatively freeze to death / heat with you gas stove/oven and suffer carbon monoxide poisoning / .... People freezing to death because they can't afford to heat has externalized cost at a certain scale. Even if you just want to look at the economic effects.
- fastball 6y agoIs it? Again, I was without power and water (not by choice) for > 72hrs and I didn't freeze to death. I would've appreciated having the choice to pay the insane (market) rate for electricity, but I didn't get a choice at all. If you're close to freezing to death and have access to a supply of electricity, turn your power on and take the hit.
- rocketpastsix 6y ago>I didn't freeze to death congrats on not dying, however others were not so lucky, and I fear these number of dead will grow in the coming days.
- fastball 6y agoMy point wasn't that it's impossible to die, my point was that if you're someone who had the option to use electricity but didn't and therefore froze to death, that's definitely your fault. You can't conflate "omg people are dying" with "omg the prices were too high". The two problems are literally mutually exclusive.
- david38 6y agoExcept this isn’t true. If the temp is 0, a family with a baby doesn’t have that right polar camping gear, then one of two things will happen * someone will take them in * they will end up in the ER when their child gets cold A good percentage of people will not have local friends with the means to help them. Now it’s a society problem. Still don’t want it to be a society problem? Pass a law banning those seeking warmth from asking for help? How many people do you think will lay down and quietly die? Very few. Most will murder before watching their child die.
- fastball 6y agoWat.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- analog31 6y agoI'm guessing that the time to propose your idea in Texas has probably come and gone for now. But still, there's always the future, and they refer to the states as "laboratories." Your proposal could address the responsibility of the owners of the electric grid in causing the outages in the first place.
- yellowapple 6y ago> you can bet your sweet ass that I would be A. monitoring the wholesale price B. switching off my main breaker the moment the price went above $X. On that note, a "smart" breaker that could do that monitoring for you and start cutting non-essential (and eventually "essential") circuits as prices exceed user-configured thresholds (perhaps integrated with a household UPS) could probably sell like gangbusters in places like Texas.