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Griddy Is Shutting Down

griddy.com

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Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usual wholesale price of electricity is around $0.11 per kWh. The retail price of electricity is around $0.16 per kWh. So you save about $0.05 per kWh used in an average month -- not bad! That's a free $20! Until a "100 year" storm comes along, and makes the wholesale price of electricity $9 per kWh. Now instead of saving $20, you owe $8,800 more than usual.

I saved around $1700/year on Griddy due to some very simple smart home automation. My goal this year was to push it much further than that, alas.

Do you have any documentation or recommended reads for how and what you did? I've been thinking of doing something similar but wondering what parts make most sense to automate

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's not exactly the free market when ERCOT fixes the price. https://www.griddy.com/post/griddy-update-why-energy-prices-... See the big image midway through the article.

What would the spot price have been in a no regulation, no price cap, no blackout market?

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#133
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how is this bad?

As I understand it, there are two ways to purchase electricity in Texas: 1) a fixed rate per kilowatt hour, regardless of what the wholesale cost is. 2) a variable rate per kilowatt hour, which is wholesale cost. If supply is up and demand is low, wholesale prices drop, so the customer pays less per kWh and ostensibly less per month. In that same vein, if supply is down and demand is high (like when power plants lite…

> As I understand it, there are two ways to purchase electricity in Texas:

You are correct, but I feel this phrasing vastly overstates how common Griddy's real time pricing is (well... was). Griddy was a startup and the only provider offering this type of plan. A few of my techy coworkers used them, but most people wouldn't have even been aware this was possible.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#134

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.…

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.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#136

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.…

> 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 thi…

Wait until r/wsb find a way to bet on this!

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#137
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe there is an exception to price gouging laws if the cost of producing the direct item/product/service is impacted. In this case Griddy's cost went way up as well, which makes them not-clearly-in-the-wrong. For the power producers on the other hand, it seems exceptionally clear (to me anyways) that this was just state-sponsored price gouging: https://theintercept.com/2021/02/23/texas-winter-storm-gas-p...

Yes, definitely wasn't trying to accuse Griddy of price gouging here, they're just a middle man. I am accusing the people who set the price of doing so (at least morally), and perhaps even the producers of the electricity who didn't set the price (as well as those who were involved in setting it) since they are going along with selling it at that exorbitant price.

The market price is literally there for them as a signal when to generate and when to not. That's the whole point of the market.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#138
post #6

Their Wikipedia page has more context, seems like those stories of Texans getting $1000+ electricity bills and the recent class-action lawsuit involved this company (I'd only seen headlines and didn't know the company's name until now): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griddy Griddy is an American power retailer that sells energy to people in the state of Texas at wholesale prices for a $10 monthly membership fee and ha…

What happens to Griddy customers? Do they just lose power until they can be onboarded with other providers?

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#139

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.…

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 additio…

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.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#140
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saved around $1700/year on Griddy due to some very simple smart home automation. My goal this year was to push it much further than that, alas.

Do you have any documentation or recommended reads for how and what you did? I've been thinking of doing something similar but wondering what parts make most sense to automate

Most likely heating and cooling is what take up the cast majority of your bill, unless you have something more unusual going on.
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