5 ms·

This fucking sucks. I'm angry. I have a pretty dark outlook when it comes to global warming, but when you're a griddy customer and you're watching your meter c

This fucking sucks. I'm angry. I have a pretty dark outlook when it comes to global warming, but when you're a griddy customer and you're watching your meter constantly, it just made sense. For a brief moment in time, a green future based on renewables felt realistic. For a brief moment in time, I felt like we might actually be able to meet carbon emission goals. When it cost a lot to make electricity, I used less. When it cost very little, I used freely. When I was able to get paid to put a load on the grid, I sure as hell did. And whenever I was thinking about this, I was able to realize that everyone who wasn't a griddy customer was not remotely aware of what was going on with wind turbines nearby. Anyone on a flat rate plan set their themostat and forgot about it, because the cost to run their AC was fixed. Whereas when the wind wasn't blowing and it was hot out, I was aware that it meant burning more natural gas, and was perfectly fine with having my thermostat a bit higher because it was going to cost me more. Regulation and politics have killed innovation, once again. Fuck that.

YarickR2 6y ago
Man, I appreciate you explaining all this in such a plain and emotional terms; you have one green energy convert right now.
anotherQuarter 6y ago
Couldn’t have said it better. This was the same experience I had. Unfortunately a lot of the bad press came from examples of people who signed up and agreed to Griddy’s terms (which were super straightforward) and then acted as if they were on a fixed rate plan. Griddy was a tiny portion of the market and the focus on them only benefits those who couldn’t keep the grid reliable and profited immensely.
- AniseAbyss 6y ago
  Well to be fair its not Griddy's fault US infrastructure is a joke. Variable rates work fine when you live in a country where the electrical grid isn't neglected.
- anotherQuarter 6y ago
  can’t edit my post but to clarify: I’m NOT convinced raising prices to $9k/kwh improved the outcome of this disaster
gizmo686 6y ago
What regulation are you referring to.
- nickysielicki 6y ago
  > Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) cited its “complete authority over ERCOT” to direct that ERCOT set pricing at $9/kWh until the grid could manage the outage situation after being ravaged by the freezing winter storm. from: https://www.griddy.com/post/griddy-update-why-energy-prices-were-sky-high-this-week https://www.griddy.com/post/griddy-update-why-energy-prices-... Prices should have fallen and did not.
  - salawat 6y ago
    The grid was under maximum demand. Heck, I was refreshing realtime statistics. That was not an unrealistic policy decision. The unrealistic policy decision was leaving it stuck there even after things started to thaw and restore. The market, as they say, she remains irrational far longer than you stay solvent.
tschwimmer 6y ago
I have a differing opinion, which is that paying market rates for electricity is not an innovation. It's a differing business model, and it's arguably a regression in terms of convenience and usability. As a consumer who doesn't work in the power industry, I don't really want to follow the power costs. When I feel cold, I want to turn the heat on. When the dishwasher is full, I want to run it. Having to do an additional mental check every time I want to use electricity sounds annoying and stressful for me. Is a market based solution better for slowing down climate change? Absolutely. Is that more importance than convince? Yes. However it's not an innovation. It's the consequence of humanity realizing that a relatively common and easy to use source of energy is killing us and we suddenly can't use it. I don't see floating market rate energy being a meaningful part of the answer to climate change. For every person like you who likes the direct feedback mechanism of market pricing, there will be 10 people who vote against it as a price increase and 100 who just won't care. More and more, it looks like the solution to climate change will be a combination of: cheaper renewables, better battery storage, some carbon intensive power generation to bridge the gap while we get to the previous two, and (in the far far future) fusion energy. Asking consumers to change their habits or reduce their energy consumption is a nonstarter.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- fredophile 6y ago
  If I had a gas station that offered gas for a fixed price, that was higher than the average gas price in your area, would you agree to use it exclusively? I don't see how the mental load for griddy is fundamentally different from buying gas at a gas station. When I notice prices are low I make the extra effort to top up my tank even if it means a small inconvenience. Do I drive less if gas prices are higher? No but other people might choose to.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > If I had a gas station that offered gas for a fixed price, that was higher than the average gas price in your area, would you agree to use it exclusively? I don’t see how the mental load for griddy is fundamentally different from buying gas at a gas station. Gas purchases are discrete events that, with extremely minimal planning are capable of being purchased from different outlets each time and, usually, time shifted to deal with per-provider or very short term spikes. Electricity puchases are continuous and the ability to shift sources or time shift is often significantly less without much more significant planning. Paying a premium for insurance against extreme variation makes some sense in either case, but a lot more in the latter case.
ocschwar 6y ago
> I have a pretty dark outlook when it comes to global warming, but when you're a griddy customer and you're watching your meter constantly, it just made sense. Yes. However... During the deep freeze, the consumer utilities were bidding up the price of juice with money they did not actually have. Ordinary consumers should not be competing for electricity with buyers who are able to buy on margin. Now we know that this can happen. Now we have to plan an alternative.
- quickthrower2 6y ago
  Wait until r/wsb find a way to bet on this!
  - fallingknife 6y ago
    Enron beat them to the game by like 20 years on this!
    - quickthrower2 6y ago
      But the power to mindlessly gamble must be democratised!
      - ocschwar 6y ago
        That's not actually what happened here. ERCOT was letting bids come in at crazy prices because at that point the only thing they were paying attention to was whether the Texas grid would collapse entirely. Volts and watts mattered. Dollars? A shared illusion anyway. Now, not only did Griddy put its users at risk of high bills with these prices, the utilities bankrupted themselves putting these bids in too. The wind farm operators could only laugh while they were getting these crazy bids for every watt from a turbine that wasn't iced up, because they knew they were getting paid with imaginary money, and they were operating the windmills because what the hell else could you do? The nat gas operators, well, they needed real money because they needed to buy gas at crazy prices, and the nat gas drillers needed money to get crews out to thaw out their infrastructure, which is extra important because we're talking about working outdoors in dangerous weather, and the crews are Texans that had not seen weather like this before. So TLDR, none of this makes any sense, and it will be settled in bankruptcy court.
aaomidi 6y ago
This is ridiculous. It was killed because it removed stability from a market that shouldn't be unstable in this day and age. Household electricity use isn't something to be this concerned about i.r.t global warming that you create thousands of dollars of debts for Americans because they didn't watch a ticker for their electricity usage. It's pretty privileged to be sad that a company that created millions of dollars of debt is going to be shut down.
tedunangst 6y ago
A company getting blown up by counter party risk doesn't sound like regulation. That's the free market at work.
- nickysielicki 6y ago
  It's not exactly the free market when ERCOT fixes the price. https://www.griddy.com/post/griddy-update-why-energy-prices-were-sky-high-this-week https://www.griddy.com/post/griddy-update-why-energy-prices-... See the big image midway through the article.
  - tedunangst 6y ago
    What would the spot price have been in a no regulation, no price cap, no blackout market?
  - dralley 6y ago
    It literally doesn't matter if custumers can't afford to pay the fixed price, much less the "true" price. And they can't.
    - nickysielicki 6y ago
      > much less the "true" price. ? I'm not trying to claim that prices didn't naturally rise by a lot, but in that particular situation (linked above), it's very clear that a lot of customers were paying $9/kWh when they could have paid $0.03/kWh. The latter is obviously easier to afford. This event sucked for griddy customers, no doubt. But for the state of Texas and ERCOT to lock the price 300x higher than it would otherwise be is ridiculous.
great_tankard 6y ago
The only reasonable thing you said was that people generally aren't acutely aware of their energy usage. That has more to do with our society's attitude towards how we build things and how we get around than anything else. To condemn people to have to devote all their waking hours to monitoring their meters is an absurd solution to that problem. Lack of regulation and poor politics have killed people, once again. Griddy was a stupid solution to the wrong problem.
zackees 6y ago
I just want to point out that Global Warming as an existential threat is more of a political position and less of a scientific one. If the scientific method were applied to real planetary destruction we would rank the use of farmland as #1. If you doubt this, use Google earth and zoom in and notice the absolute scale of destruction farmland has done to the planet. The planet has been 15 degrees hotter than it is today 150 million years ago. The fossil records show that this was an abundant time for the planet. Extinctions (including the most recent one) happen during ice ages. A hotter planet with more CO2 load would increase the greening of the planet. Additionally, there is 33x H2O in the atmosphere than CO2. Look at the total spectrum absorption of H2O vs CO2 and you’ll find H2O is a more potent green house gas, having nearly the same dipole moment. If the run away green effect was possible with CO2, it would have already happened with H2O, but this has never occurred in geological timeframe, ever. Additionally, all CO2 increases can already be mitigated via several technology stacks. One is the use of nuclear, which despite some accidents has the lowest death rate per terrawatt hour by an order of magnitude. Despite this astounding safety, the media has pushed to eliminate nuclear power even going so far as BANNING it under the green new deal. Additionally, it was discovered by oceanographers in the 1980’s that surprisingly, phytoplankton, the largest natural sequestered of CO2 on the planet was bottle necked by... drum roll please... iron in the ocean! Phytoplankton feeds zooplankton feeds fish. This is why there are record fish catches four years after a volcano eruption. And when this was discovered by oceanographer John Mayer, who proclaimed “give me half a tanker of Iron and I will produce a new ice age”, the UN finally addressed this claim by systematically banning ALL study of any size of iron ocean fertilization in 2008, despite the immense protests of oceanographers around the world. This embargo was violated in 2012 by rogue scientists off the coast of Vancouver BC who dropped a large quantity of iron off the coasts to prove that the iron would sequester this CO2, as well as Chili bucking the UN and going forward with its own studies on ocean fertilization. And I’m not even going to touch on all the verified scandals in the IPCC other than to say that if CO2 was responsible for the warming then the international community could lay the whole issue to rest immediately by an experiment whereby liquifying the air into an 11 meter vertical column and throwing a heat lamp at the top and showing that tube A heated up X% more than tube B. But despite such an obvious and dead simple experiment that would forever win the global warming argument forever, has astoundingly, never been performed. Infact if any millionaire is reading this and wants to settle this once for all, I offer to do the experiment, at cost, just to prove the world whether going from 300 parts per BILLION to 400 parts per BILLION actually makes that much of a difference, if any, to the two tubes. To put that in perspective, if 11 meters of liquified air in a vertical tube represents the amount of air between your head and space, then the amount of CO2 floating on that 11 meters would measure 3mm, increasing to 4mm (+1mm from the industrialized era), while the amount of H2O would be a full 10 centimeters, give or take. Once the scale of the difference of CO2, as a trace gas measured in PARTS PER BILLION is fully accepted onto the mind, the true absurdity of the failure to prove the CO2 super magic awesome heat trapping properties becomes so apparently rediculus that one can only go to the science papers to find this magic property. For surely, if CO2 was this great at trapping heat then it should be abundantly clear by SOME physical property that it is leaps and bounds above any other trace has that this is the case. Yet when one looks into the “science” of human caused global warming, one gets bricked walled by a complexity argument driven by computer models with secret algorithms from the IPCC, who’s board members will benefit from the carbon credit tax, which would completely unravel with (1) the large scale adoption of nuclear or (2) the dusting of the oceans with iron composites. Anyone can verify this narrative. I am not some an intel agent or compensated for this post in any way. Just an engineer that has spent WAY too many years going down every single rabbit hole that could have solved this problem but instead slowly realized that we as a human species have been guided down this fake environmental problem while the REAL environmental problem - farming, has all the air sucked out of it. This post, despite being verifiable, will likely be deleted. For those that see this post before this happens, please do your due diligence and fact check this narrative. Do your own math. Thank you for your consideration.
Nemo_bis 6y ago
I'm sorry, but calm down. This is not the end of [dynamic pricing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_pricing#Time-based_utility_pricing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_pricing#Time-based_uti...). It's just the end of one specific company's model of assuming it could just make its customers shoulder unlimited financial losses. See some examples which actually work in Norway, Finland and Estonia (connected to the [Nord Pool](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Pool https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Pool)). http://www.eemg-mediators.eu/downloads/dynamic_pricing_in_electricity_supply-2017-2520-0003-01-e.pdf http://www.eemg-mediators.eu/downloads/dynamic_pricing_in_el...
currymj 6y ago
the griddy model is that everyone should take a sort of second job as an electricity trader, but not make any money doing it. it wouldn’t be a problem if it were just a matter of paying a little more or less, that would be great. but there are catastrophic tail risks. so you have to constantly be watching because if your vigilance slips for even a few hours at a crucial time it could financially ruin you. traders at least get paid to do this and can de-risk when they need to.

YarickR2 6y ago

Man, I appreciate you explaining all this in such a plain and emotional terms; you have one green energy convert right now.

anotherQuarter 6y ago

Couldn’t have said it better. This was the same experience I had. Unfortunately a lot of the bad press came from examples of people who signed up and agreed to Griddy’s terms (which were super straightforward) and then acted as if they were on a fixed rate plan. Griddy was a tiny portion of the market and the focus on them only benefits those who couldn’t keep the grid reliable and profited immensely.

AniseAbyss 6y ago
Well to be fair its not Griddy's fault US infrastructure is a joke. Variable rates work fine when you live in a country where the electrical grid isn't neglected.
anotherQuarter 6y ago
can’t edit my post but to clarify: I’m NOT convinced raising prices to $9k/kwh improved the outcome of this disaster

gizmo686 6y ago

What regulation are you referring to.

nickysielicki 6y ago
> Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) cited its “complete authority over ERCOT” to direct that ERCOT set pricing at $9/kWh until the grid could manage the outage situation after being ravaged by the freezing winter storm. from: https://www.griddy.com/post/griddy-update-why-energy-prices-were-sky-high-this-week https://www.griddy.com/post/griddy-update-why-energy-prices-... Prices should have fallen and did not.
- salawat 6y ago
  The grid was under maximum demand. Heck, I was refreshing realtime statistics. That was not an unrealistic policy decision. The unrealistic policy decision was leaving it stuck there even after things started to thaw and restore. The market, as they say, she remains irrational far longer than you stay solvent.

tschwimmer 6y ago

I have a differing opinion, which is that paying market rates for electricity is not an innovation. It's a differing business model, and it's arguably a regression in terms of convenience and usability. As a consumer who doesn't work in the power industry, I don't really want to follow the power costs. When I feel cold, I want to turn the heat on. When the dishwasher is full, I want to run it. Having to do an additional mental check every time I want to use electricity sounds annoying and stressful for me. Is a market based solution better for slowing down climate change? Absolutely. Is that more importance than convince? Yes. However it's not an innovation. It's the consequence of humanity realizing that a relatively common and easy to use source of energy is killing us and we suddenly can't use it. I don't see floating market rate energy being a meaningful part of the answer to climate change. For every person like you who likes the direct feedback mechanism of market pricing, there will be 10 people who vote against it as a price increase and 100 who just won't care. More and more, it looks like the solution to climate change will be a combination of: cheaper renewables, better battery storage, some carbon intensive power generation to bridge the gap while we get to the previous two, and (in the far far future) fusion energy. Asking consumers to change their habits or reduce their energy consumption is a nonstarter.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
fredophile 6y ago
If I had a gas station that offered gas for a fixed price, that was higher than the average gas price in your area, would you agree to use it exclusively? I don't see how the mental load for griddy is fundamentally different from buying gas at a gas station. When I notice prices are low I make the extra effort to top up my tank even if it means a small inconvenience. Do I drive less if gas prices are higher? No but other people might choose to.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > If I had a gas station that offered gas for a fixed price, that was higher than the average gas price in your area, would you agree to use it exclusively? I don’t see how the mental load for griddy is fundamentally different from buying gas at a gas station. Gas purchases are discrete events that, with extremely minimal planning are capable of being purchased from different outlets each time and, usually, time shifted to deal with per-provider or very short term spikes. Electricity puchases are continuous and the ability to shift sources or time shift is often significantly less without much more significant planning. Paying a premium for insurance against extreme variation makes some sense in either case, but a lot more in the latter case.

ocschwar 6y ago

> I have a pretty dark outlook when it comes to global warming, but when you're a griddy customer and you're watching your meter constantly, it just made sense. Yes. However... During the deep freeze, the consumer utilities were bidding up the price of juice with money they did not actually have. Ordinary consumers should not be competing for electricity with buyers who are able to buy on margin. Now we know that this can happen. Now we have to plan an alternative.

quickthrower2 6y ago
Wait until r/wsb find a way to bet on this!
- fallingknife 6y ago
  Enron beat them to the game by like 20 years on this!
  - quickthrower2 6y ago
    But the power to mindlessly gamble must be democratised!
    - ocschwar 6y ago
      That's not actually what happened here. ERCOT was letting bids come in at crazy prices because at that point the only thing they were paying attention to was whether the Texas grid would collapse entirely. Volts and watts mattered. Dollars? A shared illusion anyway. Now, not only did Griddy put its users at risk of high bills with these prices, the utilities bankrupted themselves putting these bids in too. The wind farm operators could only laugh while they were getting these crazy bids for every watt from a turbine that wasn't iced up, because they knew they were getting paid with imaginary money, and they were operating the windmills because what the hell else could you do? The nat gas operators, well, they needed real money because they needed to buy gas at crazy prices, and the nat gas drillers needed money to get crews out to thaw out their infrastructure, which is extra important because we're talking about working outdoors in dangerous weather, and the crews are Texans that had not seen weather like this before. So TLDR, none of this makes any sense, and it will be settled in bankruptcy court.

aaomidi 6y ago

This is ridiculous. It was killed because it removed stability from a market that shouldn't be unstable in this day and age. Household electricity use isn't something to be this concerned about i.r.t global warming that you create thousands of dollars of debts for Americans because they didn't watch a ticker for their electricity usage. It's pretty privileged to be sad that a company that created millions of dollars of debt is going to be shut down.

tedunangst 6y ago

A company getting blown up by counter party risk doesn't sound like regulation. That's the free market at work.

nickysielicki 6y ago
It's not exactly the free market when ERCOT fixes the price. https://www.griddy.com/post/griddy-update-why-energy-prices-were-sky-high-this-week https://www.griddy.com/post/griddy-update-why-energy-prices-... See the big image midway through the article.
- tedunangst 6y ago
  What would the spot price have been in a no regulation, no price cap, no blackout market?
- dralley 6y ago
  It literally doesn't matter if custumers can't afford to pay the fixed price, much less the "true" price. And they can't.
  - nickysielicki 6y ago
    > much less the "true" price. ? I'm not trying to claim that prices didn't naturally rise by a lot, but in that particular situation (linked above), it's very clear that a lot of customers were paying $9/kWh when they could have paid $0.03/kWh. The latter is obviously easier to afford. This event sucked for griddy customers, no doubt. But for the state of Texas and ERCOT to lock the price 300x higher than it would otherwise be is ridiculous.

great_tankard 6y ago

The only reasonable thing you said was that people generally aren't acutely aware of their energy usage. That has more to do with our society's attitude towards how we build things and how we get around than anything else. To condemn people to have to devote all their waking hours to monitoring their meters is an absurd solution to that problem. Lack of regulation and poor politics have killed people, once again. Griddy was a stupid solution to the wrong problem.

zackees 6y ago

I just want to point out that Global Warming as an existential threat is more of a political position and less of a scientific one. If the scientific method were applied to real planetary destruction we would rank the use of farmland as #1. If you doubt this, use Google earth and zoom in and notice the absolute scale of destruction farmland has done to the planet. The planet has been 15 degrees hotter than it is today 150 million years ago. The fossil records show that this was an abundant time for the planet. Extinctions (including the most recent one) happen during ice ages. A hotter planet with more CO2 load would increase the greening of the planet. Additionally, there is 33x H2O in the atmosphere than CO2. Look at the total spectrum absorption of H2O vs CO2 and you’ll find H2O is a more potent green house gas, having nearly the same dipole moment. If the run away green effect was possible with CO2, it would have already happened with H2O, but this has never occurred in geological timeframe, ever. Additionally, all CO2 increases can already be mitigated via several technology stacks. One is the use of nuclear, which despite some accidents has the lowest death rate per terrawatt hour by an order of magnitude. Despite this astounding safety, the media has pushed to eliminate nuclear power even going so far as BANNING it under the green new deal. Additionally, it was discovered by oceanographers in the 1980’s that surprisingly, phytoplankton, the largest natural sequestered of CO2 on the planet was bottle necked by... drum roll please... iron in the ocean! Phytoplankton feeds zooplankton feeds fish. This is why there are record fish catches four years after a volcano eruption. And when this was discovered by oceanographer John Mayer, who proclaimed “give me half a tanker of Iron and I will produce a new ice age”, the UN finally addressed this claim by systematically banning ALL study of any size of iron ocean fertilization in 2008, despite the immense protests of oceanographers around the world. This embargo was violated in 2012 by rogue scientists off the coast of Vancouver BC who dropped a large quantity of iron off the coasts to prove that the iron would sequester this CO2, as well as Chili bucking the UN and going forward with its own studies on ocean fertilization. And I’m not even going to touch on all the verified scandals in the IPCC other than to say that if CO2 was responsible for the warming then the international community could lay the whole issue to rest immediately by an experiment whereby liquifying the air into an 11 meter vertical column and throwing a heat lamp at the top and showing that tube A heated up X% more than tube B. But despite such an obvious and dead simple experiment that would forever win the global warming argument forever, has astoundingly, never been performed. Infact if any millionaire is reading this and wants to settle this once for all, I offer to do the experiment, at cost, just to prove the world whether going from 300 parts per BILLION to 400 parts per BILLION actually makes that much of a difference, if any, to the two tubes. To put that in perspective, if 11 meters of liquified air in a vertical tube represents the amount of air between your head and space, then the amount of CO2 floating on that 11 meters would measure 3mm, increasing to 4mm (+1mm from the industrialized era), while the amount of H2O would be a full 10 centimeters, give or take. Once the scale of the difference of CO2, as a trace gas measured in PARTS PER BILLION is fully accepted onto the mind, the true absurdity of the failure to prove the CO2 super magic awesome heat trapping properties becomes so apparently rediculus that one can only go to the science papers to find this magic property. For surely, if CO2 was this great at trapping heat then it should be abundantly clear by SOME physical property that it is leaps and bounds above any other trace has that this is the case. Yet when one looks into the “science” of human caused global warming, one gets bricked walled by a complexity argument driven by computer models with secret algorithms from the IPCC, who’s board members will benefit from the carbon credit tax, which would completely unravel with (1) the large scale adoption of nuclear or (2) the dusting of the oceans with iron composites. Anyone can verify this narrative. I am not some an intel agent or compensated for this post in any way. Just an engineer that has spent WAY too many years going down every single rabbit hole that could have solved this problem but instead slowly realized that we as a human species have been guided down this fake environmental problem while the REAL environmental problem - farming, has all the air sucked out of it. This post, despite being verifiable, will likely be deleted. For those that see this post before this happens, please do your due diligence and fact check this narrative. Do your own math. Thank you for your consideration.

Nemo_bis 6y ago

I'm sorry, but calm down. This is not the end of [dynamic pricing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_pricing#Time-based_utility_pricing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_pricing#Time-based_uti...). It's just the end of one specific company's model of assuming it could just make its customers shoulder unlimited financial losses. See some examples which actually work in Norway, Finland and Estonia (connected to the [Nord Pool](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Pool https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Pool)). http://www.eemg-mediators.eu/downloads/dynamic_pricing_in_electricity_supply-2017-2520-0003-01-e.pdf http://www.eemg-mediators.eu/downloads/dynamic_pricing_in_el...

currymj 6y ago

the griddy model is that everyone should take a sort of second job as an electricity trader, but not make any money doing it. it wouldn’t be a problem if it were just a matter of paying a little more or less, that would be great. but there are catastrophic tail risks. so you have to constantly be watching because if your vigilance slips for even a few hours at a crucial time it could financially ruin you. traders at least get paid to do this and can de-risk when they need to.