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I wonder why there wasn't some sort of stop-loss pricing (disconnect service if price exceeds X) built into the user agreement. That would have prevented all th

I wonder why there wasn't some sort of stop-loss pricing (disconnect service if price exceeds X) built into the user agreement. That would have prevented all the negative publicity. Griddy was a great idea, but it wasn't for everyone. Especially those who don't have backup solar or generators.

nrmitchi 6y ago
> That would have prevented all the negative publicity. Naw, it would have just shifted it to "Electricity Company cuts power to customers during Deadly Cold"
- wmf 6y ago
  Yeah, when it's 11F outside the choice between a $10,000 bill and shutting off power is a no-win situation.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    Not as much of a no-win situation if you've got a (wood) fireplace/furnace, or at least a metal barrel and some trash to burn. But considering the normal weather in Texas, I ain't too surprised if these things are rarities.
gruez 6y ago
AFAIK because electricity is so essential, you can't cut off people's power without going through a lengthy process. You also can't cut off people's power during the winter, either.
- myself248 6y ago
  So there's a form of it called "interruptible service", which is intended for things like water heaters. It lets the utility shed load during peak times, but it's part of the consumer rate plan so there are limits on how often and how long they can interrupt it for, etc.
  - astrange 6y ago
    There's also programs like OhmConnect (https://www.ohmconnect.com https://www.ohmconnect.com) where they just ask you nicely to stop using power under load, and maybe turn off your A/C, and pay you for it. I gave up optimizing too much because my water heater forgets its temperature setting when you cut the power, and it's not like they paid me much anyway. Good thing I'm on the 100% renewable SVCE plan.
gwbas1c 6y ago
Doesn't have to be a full disconnect. It could simply be a smart thermostat that drops the heat to 50(F) and smart breakers that turn off dryers and dishwashers. If all you use is LED lighting, low heat, and keep off your 'l33t gaming rig, you could make it through a high cost incident without losing power.
Nemo_bis 6y ago
That could happen with instant settlement, but it's not necessarily desirable. Matt Levine covered the idea: > In an electricity crisis, what you kind of want is to generate as much electricity as possible, and distribute it as efficiently and fairly as possible, and then send out bills later, and if people can’t pay the bills you sit down and figure out how to allocate the losses. Perhaps you have a Draconian allocation of “anyone who got the electricity has to pay the bill even if it takes the rest of eternity to work it off,” or perhaps you have some loss-sharing arrangement where the state or federal government eats some of the cost, or it’s allocated proportionally among ratepayers and utility shareholders over the next decade, or whatever. But you have some leisure to decide that, to have different stakeholders argue about it in different venues, if you let the electricity crisis turn into a credit crisis. If you just let it turn into a much worse electricity crisis then you miss your chance to fix it. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-26/startups-sometimes-stretch-the-truth https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-26/startu...
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  But this is solving the wrong problem. It's an economic non-solution to the fact that there's excess demand in one place and excess production in another. The problem in Texas had two root causes. One was that decades of climate change denial is starting to make black swan events more likely than they would have been otherwise. This is unforgivably irrational, because these effects have been predicted - accurately - for decades now. The second was that Texas decided it wasn't going to share power with other states, supposedly because federal regulation was somehow a bad thing. Price discovery and rationing are ineffective mitigations for the irrational self-harming effects of poor strategic decisions caused by prioritising economic ideology over physical integrity. Economics is full of these non-solutions. Price discovery is possibly one of the most common. It's like having a tool box full of broken screwdrivers and wondering why the houses you build keep collapsing. At some point "At least I saved some money because these tools were cheap" stops being a credible argument.
  - salawat 6y ago
    Even if Texas were fully integrated with the National grids, there was not enough excess capacity to meet the Texas' increased needs in addition to every other affected States' demand. Heck, it would habe magnified the severity of the problem. All the Mexico connections were shut down because they had their own issues. We could very well have ended up with a cascading grid failure on a National scale, which would have helped nobody. This is not just a Texas problem, and the fact it stayed isolated to Texas and didn't effect other States' adversely was entirely an artifact of Texas' independent grid.

nrmitchi 6y ago

> That would have prevented all the negative publicity. Naw, it would have just shifted it to "Electricity Company cuts power to customers during Deadly Cold"

wmf 6y ago
Yeah, when it's 11F outside the choice between a $10,000 bill and shutting off power is a no-win situation.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  Not as much of a no-win situation if you've got a (wood) fireplace/furnace, or at least a metal barrel and some trash to burn. But considering the normal weather in Texas, I ain't too surprised if these things are rarities.

gruez 6y ago

AFAIK because electricity is so essential, you can't cut off people's power without going through a lengthy process. You also can't cut off people's power during the winter, either.

myself248 6y ago
So there's a form of it called "interruptible service", which is intended for things like water heaters. It lets the utility shed load during peak times, but it's part of the consumer rate plan so there are limits on how often and how long they can interrupt it for, etc.
- astrange 6y ago
  There's also programs like OhmConnect (https://www.ohmconnect.com https://www.ohmconnect.com) where they just ask you nicely to stop using power under load, and maybe turn off your A/C, and pay you for it. I gave up optimizing too much because my water heater forgets its temperature setting when you cut the power, and it's not like they paid me much anyway. Good thing I'm on the 100% renewable SVCE plan.

gwbas1c 6y ago

Doesn't have to be a full disconnect. It could simply be a smart thermostat that drops the heat to 50(F) and smart breakers that turn off dryers and dishwashers. If all you use is LED lighting, low heat, and keep off your 'l33t gaming rig, you could make it through a high cost incident without losing power.

Nemo_bis 6y ago

That could happen with instant settlement, but it's not necessarily desirable. Matt Levine covered the idea: > In an electricity crisis, what you kind of want is to generate as much electricity as possible, and distribute it as efficiently and fairly as possible, and then send out bills later, and if people can’t pay the bills you sit down and figure out how to allocate the losses. Perhaps you have a Draconian allocation of “anyone who got the electricity has to pay the bill even if it takes the rest of eternity to work it off,” or perhaps you have some loss-sharing arrangement where the state or federal government eats some of the cost, or it’s allocated proportionally among ratepayers and utility shareholders over the next decade, or whatever. But you have some leisure to decide that, to have different stakeholders argue about it in different venues, if you let the electricity crisis turn into a credit crisis. If you just let it turn into a much worse electricity crisis then you miss your chance to fix it. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-26/startups-sometimes-stretch-the-truth https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-26/startu...

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
But this is solving the wrong problem. It's an economic non-solution to the fact that there's excess demand in one place and excess production in another. The problem in Texas had two root causes. One was that decades of climate change denial is starting to make black swan events more likely than they would have been otherwise. This is unforgivably irrational, because these effects have been predicted - accurately - for decades now. The second was that Texas decided it wasn't going to share power with other states, supposedly because federal regulation was somehow a bad thing. Price discovery and rationing are ineffective mitigations for the irrational self-harming effects of poor strategic decisions caused by prioritising economic ideology over physical integrity. Economics is full of these non-solutions. Price discovery is possibly one of the most common. It's like having a tool box full of broken screwdrivers and wondering why the houses you build keep collapsing. At some point "At least I saved some money because these tools were cheap" stops being a credible argument.
- salawat 6y ago
  Even if Texas were fully integrated with the National grids, there was not enough excess capacity to meet the Texas' increased needs in addition to every other affected States' demand. Heck, it would habe magnified the severity of the problem. All the Mexico connections were shut down because they had their own issues. We could very well have ended up with a cascading grid failure on a National scale, which would have helped nobody. This is not just a Texas problem, and the fact it stayed isolated to Texas and didn't effect other States' adversely was entirely an artifact of Texas' independent grid.