Not a fan of this. People buying electricity at wholesale prices is on them.
It’s surprising there isn’t some insurance product to defend against the surprise bills.
Like, oh, say, "regular consumer electric rates" that everyone ordinarily pays?
Griddy Is Shutting Down
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Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down
#12Not a fan of this. People buying electricity at wholesale prices is on them.
I disagree completely. This business model should never have been allowed to exist, in the same way and for the same reason that " almost fully self-driving cars" should not be allowed on the roads: humans are just not capable of quickly and correctly responding in situations where 99.99% of the time no input is required and once in a blue moon you have to act immediately to avoid disaster. Good riddance.
Griddy seems like it would be a win-win for people with solar panels and decent battery storage
Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down
#13Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down
#14Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down
#15Context? Edit: thanks, guys!
Griddy is/was an electricity retailer that sold at wholesale prices to customers. The cold front in texas lead to extremely high prices. This impact has been most evident for Griddy users who did not reduce their energy usage. There have been many news reports about people with $9k or $16k energy bills.
Griddy is a very small part of the market and didn’t make any additional profit from the raised prices but all the same they have had a lot of press.
Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down
#16Not a fan of this. People buying electricity at wholesale prices is on them.
It’s surprising there isn’t some insurance product to defend against the surprise bills.
I assume you're being sarcastic, but if not, that "insurance product" is "use a fixed-rate pricing provider", like pretty much everyone in the state.
Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down
#17Not a fan of this. People buying electricity at wholesale prices is on them.
I disagree completely. This business model should never have been allowed to exist, in the same way and for the same reason that " almost fully self-driving cars" should not be allowed on the roads: humans are just not capable of quickly and correctly responding in situations where 99.99% of the time no input is required and once in a blue moon you have to act immediately to avoid disaster. Good riddance.
The only way other electric companies would be able to eat the difference between retail and wholesale rates would be to overcharge for years, hoard cash, and then pay out that buffer during this crisis. Presumably, this is what they did.
Doesn't actually seem better for consumers?
Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree completely. This business model should never have been allowed to exist, in the same way and for the same reason that " almost fully self-driving cars" should not be allowed on the roads: humans are just not capable of quickly and correctly responding in situations where 99.99% of the time no input is required and once in a blue moon you have to act immediately to avoid disaster. Good riddance.
Griddy seems like it would be a win-win for people with solar panels and decent battery storage
Or people who knowingly, and flexibly, use a large amount of power.
Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down
#19I always thought this was a good idea for a company. Almost all of the electricity providers in Texas all buy energy at wholesale prices and lock customers into long term contracts. If you were an electricity provider, what would be the best plan that you would want for yourself and your friends? My answer to that would be to have access to buy energy at the cheap wholesale prices for a flat monthly fee. This seems to be the griddy model and I almost switched to them.
It's a good thing that I didn't because griddy customers are the ones that got multi-thousand dollar electricity bills after the recent Texas disaster.
Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down
#20Not a fan of this. People buying electricity at wholesale prices is on them.
The problem here as I understand it is that ERCOT stepped in and artificially set an absurdly high wholesale price, to try to stimulate production. And then Griddy was forced to pass this price straight down to their customers. The narrative about this being a "market failure" seems really wrong. Really seems like it should be on TX to make the customers whole here, given that they ordered Griddy to pass along huge a…
>The problem here as I understand it is that ERCOT stepped in and artificially set an absurdly high wholesale price
Incorrect. ERCOT set a price ceiling, not a price. The wholesale price without the ERCOT price ceiling would have been far, far higher than $9000 kwh. That ERCOT is at blame for the price ceiling is absurd.
* ERCOT is to blame for a lot of other things though.