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Griddy Is Shutting Down

griddy.com

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Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#161

Post by Traster »

asdf333 wrote: post #158
Traster wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re missing the wood for the trees a bit here. Firstly, the scale of the incident in TX went for beyond what could be handled by demand management through price controls anyway- most of the supply isn’t designed to handle those temperatures. No rate was going to increase supply (which is obviously half of the equation). On the demand side it’s a much more complex question than demand being inelastic. No ma…

there are stories of many empty office buildings fully powered with the lights on throughout the whole thing. Its possible if they were on a more price sensitive system those commercial property owners would have opted to shut off more of the power.

We can have a totally different attitude towards commercial property, I agree.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#162

Post by nannal »

m463 wrote: post #155
irrational wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We installed solar panels a few years ago. They take care of 100% of our electrical needs (and we live in Portland Oregon where it is cloudy 9 months out of the year). I haven’t had to pay more than $12/month, and that is the fee we are charged by PGE to be hooked into the grid so we can sell them our excess. One thing I’ve found out is that we no longer worry about electricity usage. I used to fret about lights bein…

On the other hand, electricity pricing is a construct. To some extent it is designed so that you do worry and limit use of a shared resource. I think other utilities like internet service adopt this construct, then monetize worry to get you to pay a little more for all-you-can-eat. There's an interesting quote from a former chairman of the atomic energy commission: It is not too much to expect that our children will…

Can you imagine being that hopeful about the future, I know a lot of people are opting not to have children due to the environmental nightmare those children would have to survive.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#163

Post by OJFord »

gruez wrote: post #97
nrmitchi wrote: post #75

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...

>I believe there is an exception to price gouging laws if the cost of producing the direct item/product/service is impacted. nope. https://www.natlawreview.com/article/don-t-mess-texas-price-... >Unlike many state price gouging statutes, [Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Act] does not contain an exception for increased costs.

(Not American) this all seems very left-wing for Texas?

And what're you supposed to do, sell at a loss because there's a disaster on? Or is it not just during disasters?

Presumably you're allowed to close business instead, but why's that better; no widgets are better than expensive widgets?

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#164

Post by ahdinosaur »

Teever wrote: post #153
fredophile wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Does anywhere else in the world sell electricity like this?

local to me is Flick Electric in New Zealand: https://www.flickelectric.co.nz/freestyle

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#165

Post by thaumasiotes »

rococode wrote: 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…

> On February 15, during the power crisis, the state's Public Utility Commission required ERCOT to set the price to the $9,000 maximum. The commission reasoned that the trading prices for energy (as low as $1,200) were inconsistent with the supply scarcity.

Huh??

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#166

Post by sarabob »

zackees wrote: post #134
nickysielicki wrote: post #50

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 toda…

Parts per million, not parts per billion. [1]

Yes, H2O is the strongest greenhouse gas, but its concentration (~5000ppm average) is limited by temperature and it will condense out as mist/clouds/rain. CO2 is nowhere near saturation levels, so atmospheric levels of CO2 have been growing. [2]

By all means you can tell the world that we should go back to a planet that looks like it did 15M years ago (miocene), but a 40m sea level increase is a pretty hard sell and IMHO does not match the "this is fine" tone of your post.

CO2 tends not to liquify but forms solid dry ice, so CO2 is not present in "liquid air" [3] (nor is anything with a boiling point "an engineer that has spent WAY too many years going down every single rabbit hole" is hard to justify based on the easily-debunked assertions you make, but even if you are correct and farming is the biggest cause and that it can/should bear the brunt of reduction efforts, it does not follow that we should therefore ignore all other avenues to address the problem. Yes, iron may be a part of the solution, but can you not see that building wind turbines, insulating houses and having electric cars is less risky than dumping huge quantities of iron in the sea?

Please consider that there _is no conspiracy_ and that scientists are mostly underpaid humans with a deep interest in their areas of study. Also consider that we know that fossil fuel companies have been funding AGW-denial. If you want conspiracies, try looking there.

[1]https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/... [2]https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/climatescience/climatesci... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_air

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#167

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

Nemo_bis wrote: post #151
bmarquez wrote: post #35

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.

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 alloca…

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.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#168

Post by salawat »

asdf333 wrote: post #158
Traster wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re missing the wood for the trees a bit here. Firstly, the scale of the incident in TX went for beyond what could be handled by demand management through price controls anyway- most of the supply isn’t designed to handle those temperatures. No rate was going to increase supply (which is obviously half of the equation). On the demand side it’s a much more complex question than demand being inelastic. No ma…

there are stories of many empty office buildings fully powered with the lights on throughout the whole thing. Its possible if they were on a more price sensitive system those commercial property owners would have opted to shut off more of the power.

You need to keep in mind what caused that.

In Austin's cade, Austin Energy built out way too much off of essential circuits. Office buildings stayed lit because they trunked off a circuit feeding medical centers, emergency services, that type of thing.

So the only place Austin Energy could go for load shedding was their residential customer base. Even then; they didn't execute true "rolling" blackouts, because that implies dividing the supply of power you have somewhat evenly across your entire customer population in a reasonable time based multiplexing scheme so that everyone gets their chance to run the heat. To minimize the amount of time people go without any heat, and at regular intervals so people can plan their consumption.

Can't speak for other metroplexes, and the co-op I get power from did a perfect job.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#169

Post by salawat »

Nemo_bis wrote: post #149
wmf wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shorting electricity? Hear me out, it's like Robinhood for Enron.

See Matt Levine: > The people signing contracts to buy Texas electricity at wholesale prices were doing so to economize. In some theoretical sense they accepted higher price volatility in exchange for usually lower prices, but in a much more practical sense they wanted the usually lower prices and couldn’t afford the higher price volatility. And then when prices rose they were wiped out. > But the Griddy stories sugg…

The Internet, and tech in particular, has completely changed the business sphere by throwing out that whole "meeting of the minds" concept that was taken for necessary in any contractual relationship.

In the past, one could count on their hands and feet the number of contracts that one would enter into over one's life.

Now? There's so much churn that the act of accepting is more a ritual or formality. One that sadly has the capability to take advantage of a lot of people due to information asymmetry.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#170

Post by AniseAbyss »

Nemo_bis wrote: post #149
wmf wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shorting electricity? Hear me out, it's like Robinhood for Enron.

See Matt Levine: > The people signing contracts to buy Texas electricity at wholesale prices were doing so to economize. In some theoretical sense they accepted higher price volatility in exchange for usually lower prices, but in a much more practical sense they wanted the usually lower prices and couldn’t afford the higher price volatility. And then when prices rose they were wiped out. > But the Griddy stories sugg…

Lets be real when you are poor you're trying to make it through the month on your paycheck.
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