151–160 of 223 posts
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That's kind of the core of the problem with healthcare in the US. We treat it like a market where you can't see the prices and where customer are forced to buy the product or die. Then we wonder why it's so expensive.
Perhaps if we call everyone in healthcare heroes and let them control the supply of healthcare things will get better.
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I'm not sure we can really say "smart consumers aware of the risk." Isn't it more like "Opportunistic customers who hoped the risks were immaterial beat a path . . . " Out of morbid curiosity, during a long drive this weekend, I listened to 20 minutes of an AM radio guy's pitch for some retirement annuity system that sounded quite sweet at first. As he kept talking, though, I realized that he was being very evasive a…
I consulted for a large existing REP to help analyze the market and suggest strategies for launching their own Griddy competitor brand. So when I say "smart consumers aware of the risk" that is exactly who the research showed the customer was. The initial customers were people perfectly capable of the arbitrage. They even had customers using IFTTT to turn up the thermostat (summer months) when prices would spike (in…
>Those that chose Griddy, chose higher risk, which comes with high potential rewards but also high potential losses When I lived in the poor part of town, "energy deregulation" companies were always coming around, aggressively trying to get me to sign up on the spot. They never talked about risk, they just told me I could sign here to save $100s on my power bill. I asked them about the details and they just lied thro…
It also sounds awful. It would objectively be a regression from reliable electricity to unreliable electricity, like in an undeveloped country.
The only thing such a technology would do is give the power companies a BS way to shift the blame for their planning fuck ups onto consumers, because technically it would be the consumer's equipment that killed the power.
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Nice victim blaming.
Stop using this term for people who were not victims of anyone other than themselves, it hurts actual victims.
If everyone had this kind of attitude, we'd still be driving cars with no seatbelts.
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TX is __slightly__ different in that its fully deregulated and there's simply more knowledge about REPs/ESCOs and their pricing (because they customers HAVE to choose a REP). Also in what other state do you see billboard ads for REPs? What is genuinely sad is that Griddy has a "price-lock" (ie a fixed rate) for the summer, which is exactly what you're talking about regarding tail risk. They just don't have it for the…
I'm not sure they could have offered a reasonable fixed rate for the available power. When the federal DOE authorized the supply of emergency power that didn't meet the usual regulations, they required the price to be at least 10x the normal price ("no lower than $1,500/MWh"). I haven't been able to find out how much of the power supply that applied to, but at least some of the power during the disaster was legally r…
I've read the Dept of Energy doc, and I think they were trying to make sure that power companies could pay for the pollution offset credits after the fact. Also, since Texas has a soldi market based power system, they wanted to make polluting power the least desired. Little did they know.....
>Those that chose Griddy, chose higher risk, which comes with high potential rewards but also high potential losses When I lived in the poor part of town, "energy deregulation" companies were always coming around, aggressively trying to get me to sign up on the spot. They never talked about risk, they just told me I could sign here to save $100s on my power bill. I asked them about the details and they just lied thro…
I think the Griddy scheme is in the process of destroying itself, as it becomes apparent how many people won't be paying their bills, either through bankruptcy or populist legislation. Despite not seeming so on paper, Griddy itself has significant long tail risk.
A great way to hedge while having Griddy would be to make a deal with your neighbor to run an extension cord when the spot price gets too high. Sleazy, but what isn't these days.
Of course such arbitrage just pushes the market as a whole towards time of use pricing, which isn't a bad thing as long as the unreasonable pathologies get worked out.
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Griddy didn't have to beat the bricks like most REP's in Texas. Smart consumers aware of the risk beat a path to their door. Unfortunately, as with anything like this, the followers and fools soon showed up (reminiscent of $GME) and a good thing somehow suddenly became "a scam".
" a good thing somehow suddenly became "a scam"." Does Griddy push real-time cost information to consumers to enable them to react to situations like this? "Scam" might be harsh, but their model clearly failed.
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Perhaps if we call everyone in healthcare heroes and let them control the supply of healthcare things will get better.
It seems more likely we'll call them heroes while laying them off.
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It’s high risk, low reward too. The upside is a small reduction in my monthly power bill. The downside is ...this. If you want griddy+calls, you can get that already in the form of a traditional electricity service.
Phrased that way, it sounds like it is exactly the opposite of insurance. Pay a little less when times are normal, in favor of a spectacular lack of protection when times are hard.
The most obvious one would be to just disconnect your house from the grid whenever prices exceed some threshold that only actually happens once a decade.
Even if that means you go stay in a hotel, doing that once every ten years for thousands of dollars in savings over the same period could be totally worth it. And there are also even less inconvenient alternatives, like buying a generator for less than you save in electricity and using it during price spikes, which means you also get a "free" generator to use during ordinary power outages.
Meanwhile it helps the grid because people who are willing to do this voluntarily remove load during crunch time and prevent the need to do rolling blackouts that unexpectedly freeze people's pipes.
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Stop using this term for people who were not victims of anyone other than themselves, it hurts actual victims.
The reason why we have things like regulations and consumer protection laws is exactly to prevent people from, as you put it, becoming victims of themselves. If everyone had this kind of attitude, we'd still be driving cars with no seatbelts.
It's very easy to become a "victim" of yourself even in a regulated world and I assure you the number of people who do will not go down, only the means of doing so will change. Perhaps we should focus on education instead of regulation.