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On power markets, snow storms, and $16k power bills

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Re: On power markets, snow storms, and $16k power bills

#171

Post by salawat »

uadnils wrote: post #45

1. The statement "it’s clear that those high prices weren’t doing their job" and subsequent disagreement with raising the price cap does not make sense to me. Any artificial price cap seems to limit the effectiveness of a market. From the producer's side, it limits the incentive to model and capture these tail events (e.g. winterize). From the consumer's side, it limits the incentive to reduce consumption. Is my pers…

>2)...Are there legal or practical reasons this can't happen?

A) That would essentially be energy futures trading.

B) No sane power company is going to take on new customers when they can barely keep up with demand already.

Re: On power markets, snow storms, and $16k power bills

#172

Post by ardy42 »

Anon1096 wrote: post #98
ahepp wrote: post #66

>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…

The existence of Griddy is unrelated to energy deregulation. I keep seeing that term thrown around but no one using it seems to know what it means. Griddy is simply an energy provider you can choose to hedge your bets and save money if you are smart. Plenty of people using it shut off their power or switched providers when they were informed of the incoming price surge. That some households ignoring the warnings shou…

> Griddy is simply an energy provider you can choose to hedge your bets and save money if you are smart. Plenty of people using it shut off their power or switched providers when they were informed of the incoming price surge. That some households ignoring the warnings shouldn't be a reason a service like Griddy can't exist.

It's not reasonable to expect households to monitor their electricity rates or alert emails that closely nor be prepared to drop everything to switch providers at a moment's notice for an entirely unexpected reason. I know I don't immediately read every email I get.

An even if someone was monitoring that closely, or was ready to jump, there's no guarantee they'll be able to switch:

https://6abc.com/griddy-gridy-texas-power-bills-what-is-ener...:

> In a rare move Sunday night, Griddy sent out an email to all 29,000 of its customers, urging them to switch to a different provider. Thigpen says she tried Monday morning, but no one was taking new customers....

> We reached out to a few providers here in Texas. They are not taking customers. Some say they may accept new customers by next Wednesday, when they say the weather has improved. That was the earliest 'maybe' answer we could get.

Re: On power markets, snow storms, and $16k power bills

#173

Post by nine_k »

Skunkleton wrote: post #118
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the idea of consumers responding to energy prices is nice, but has some pretty glaring issues I am a high-income New Yorker. If this were available to me, and if I could (a) set a cap past which I lose power or, preferably, (b) hedge by buying power call options, I’d take it. (Depending on the cost of (b).) That said, it’s a complicated financial product. We don’t sell derivatives, structured products and alternati…

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.

I'm also a reasonably well-off New Yorker, and I made the switch.

My apartment does not rely on electricity for heating; it's steam-based. Were it electricity-based, I won't switch.

But in the summer the price of electricity is like 50% of what plain Con Edison used to offer, and it's the time when power consumption peaks because of the running of air conditioning all day.

The reported generation mix is low-carbon, about half of it comes from nuclear plants, some from hydro and solar, about 1/3 from gas-fired stations, apparently zero from coal-firing stations.

So, for me it's a win-win so far.

Re: On power markets, snow storms, and $16k power bills

#174

Post by [deleted] »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #159
tunesmith wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except that there are ways to get the protection somewhere else, in ways that are potentially advantageous. 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.…

[deleted]

Re: On power markets, snow storms, and $16k power bills

#175

Post by mattuk89 »

brandmeyer wrote: post #139
ahepp wrote: post #66

>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 suspect you could get 99% of the effect by only passing a small price window to consumers. I've been thinking about this problem for some years now, since I first became involved in microgrid controls. Rather than change the dynamics by limiting amplitude, I would change the dynamics by adjusting information latency. Schedule customer pricing based on the day-ahead market clearing price instead of the spot price.…

I'm on the "Agile Octopus" tariff in the UK and this is broadly how it works - the next days prices are available around 4pm the day before, giving you time to plan. There is also a cap of 35p/kWh (the standard fixed rate tariff is 15p/kWh for comparison) which limits the downside risk somewhat. In peak hours during the winter it regularly hits the cap. Bit of a halfway house between pure time of use and fixed tariffs.

Re: On power markets, snow storms, and $16k power bills

#176

Post by ryanmarsh »

bumby wrote: post #165
ryanmarsh wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you elaborate on how the research was conducted and specifically how the risk was measured by consumers? There’s an awful lot of research that implies humans are very poor estimators of low probability / high severity events

Research was normal UX/cust research... interviews, polls, etc.

Customers were intelligent and motivated by a desire to do their own hedging rather than have an REP in the middle with an opaque profits. There’s a lot of profit in there and customers wanted to keep it. Customer ultimately knows his own demand and tolerances better than any REP. When I say “he” I mean men. Overwhelmingly male market. Lots of small business owners, day traders, cognizant their investment performance. This was very early. Few had even heard of Griddy at this point. I think it’s a fantastic addition to the market. What’s missing is the ability to hold futures. That would really level the playing field for sophisticated customers.

Re: On power markets, snow storms, and $16k power bills

#177

Post by ajford »

phicoh wrote: post #138
nicoburns wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This article seems to suggest the answer is a fully automated smart home, with some kind of AI to intelligently manage your power usage. Sounds awesome, but I don't think that's ever going to be a reality outside the valley. It's not the answer yet. But I'd be very surprised if it wasn't the norm in developed nations in 10-20 years. It's an obvious response to inconsistent generation from renewables, and the techno…

I don't see how that would work. Suppose there is no wind for a couple of days, do you expect homes to shutdown everything and wait for wind to return? Solar in a desert is easier, if you only have to cover the night then install a big enough battery. But a battry in every home is probably less efficient than a huge battery next to the solar panels. So most likely, renewables come with storage. And the smart grid ide…

The solution for things like this is a multi-facet power grid, with renewables, nuclear, and (small ammounts of) fossil fuels, paired with grid-scale energy storage.

For example, the pumped hydro station in Wales [0] can store up to 9.1GWh and can push 1.8GW peak, with a spin up time under a minute.

Systems like these can serve both as buffers until fossil fuel or nuclear reactors can spin up to peak in the even of wind/solar shortage, and can even serve as overnight generation to replace solar if large enough (given the usually much lower demand at night).

If each state was required to implement their own (presumably smaller) grid-scale storage this would have the benefit of removing a single point of failure and spread the cost. A construction project of this scale would also serve to create hundreds or thousands of jobs in various areas, stimulating the economy.

Having grid-scale storage would be drastically improved with a smart grid, since it would have much more real-time data on power demands and allow more seamless management of capacity.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Jx_bJgIFhI

Re: On power markets, snow storms, and $16k power bills

#178

Post by InitialLastName »

tshaddox wrote: post #42
Spivak wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you have to do this on the meter side? Cant your power company shut off your power from their end?

No, I suspect power companies cannot generally shut off your power from their end. There's not a separate cable from the power plant to each individual home. There are really big cables that go most of the way from the power plant, then at each neighbhorhood or block they split off into smaller cables for individual homes. That's where the meter for each home is installed, and that's where the power company can turn…

On the last thing, AIUI from some research (confirmed as plausible by experience with similar systems):

- The stream channels themselves are encrypted or scrambled in a way that is hard to unwind unless you have the keys (keeping non-SiriusXM radios from working)

- Each radio has two important pieces of information: a decryption key from SiriusXM and a UUID (I'd guess 64bit, as that's a pretty standard size for hardware-baked-in UUIDs. It might be 128bit instead). You can look up the UUID for your radio. Both of those things, by the way, are bog-standard now in consumer embedded systems exactly because they help prevent bootlegging.

- Channel 0 is an ID channel that constantly streams out a list of valid UUIDs and other configuration data. An un-activated radio can only tune that channel. When it sees its own ID, it enables the rest of the channels.

Quick sanity check: Assuming they have 40 million subscribers and can pass UUIDs at roughly audio rate (to make the math easy, 16-bit, 50kHz), that makes it about an hour to sync all the users. That can probably be watched by your radio in the background, so it's only an issue for initial activation.

Re: On power markets, snow storms, and $16k power bills

#179

Post by tunesmith »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #159
tunesmith wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except that there are ways to get the protection somewhere else, in ways that are potentially advantageous. 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.…

I think there's one other aspect though which is similar to insurance - you can't time the "bad times" and they can come at the most inconvenient times, including when you do not have the wherewithal to trigger your various backup plans.

Generators automatically notice when the regular power goes off, but I don't know if they can automatically notice when prices rise above a certain threshold.

Re: On power markets, snow storms, and $16k power bills

#180

Post by martinald »

AnssiH wrote: post #83
martinald wrote: post #37

In the UK energy supplier Octopus has an "agile" tariff which is similar to griddy (we are increasingly getting negative prices here). However, it has a 35p/kWh price cap (2-3x average rates). I don't understand why Griddy didn't do something similar. Even a $1/kWh price cap would have really helped them.

Similar with my provider in Finland, capped at 0.085€/kWh (approx. 2x avg): https://www.sahkolaitos.fi/en/products/tuntisahko/

Wow, those are some great prices! How come Finnish electricity is so cheap?
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