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Griddy Is Shutting Down

griddy.com

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Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#171

Post by AniseAbyss »

anotherQuarter wrote: post #74
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.…

Couldn’t have said it better. This was the same experience I had. Unfortunately a lot of the bad press came from examples of people who signed up and agreed to Griddy’s terms (which were super straightforward) and then acted as if they were on a fixed rate plan. Griddy was a tiny portion of the market and the focus on them only benefits those who couldn’t keep the grid reliable and profited immensely.

Well to be fair its not Griddy's fault US infrastructure is a joke. Variable rates work fine when you live in a country where the electrical grid isn't neglected.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#172

Post by salawat »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #167
Nemo_bis wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -…

Even if Texas were fully integrated with the National grids, there was not enough excess capacity to meet the Texas' increased needs in addition to every other affected States' demand. Heck, it would habe magnified the severity of the problem. All the Mexico connections were shut down because they had their own issues. We could very well have ended up with a cascading grid failure on a National scale, which would have helped nobody.

This is not just a Texas problem, and the fact it stayed isolated to Texas and didn't effect other States' adversely was entirely an artifact of Texas' independent grid.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#173

Post by tialaramex »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #165
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??

Suppose there is apparent demand for 100GW of power. Due to faults your region's generators are only able to supply 75GW of power maximum no matter what price you offer. So you deliberately drop some groups of customers (rolling blackouts to residential areas). Now your residual demand (ignoring those customers freezing in the dark) sum to only 65GW†, you can supply them all. Great!

If your system automatically adjusts price to hit demand it will begin reducing the price, after all demand is lower than supply, how about $6000? $3000? $1200? Ah, that seems to be the magic number. At $1200 we can get 65GW of power.

But wait, we don't want 65GW of power. We want 100GW of power, the fact we can't have that means rolling blackouts. It makes no sense to cause rolling blackouts and reduce prices, the prices need to stay high until we can actually supply everybody.

In a more sensibly architected system, low priority industrial users are blacked out first, and if you must have rolling blackouts for residential customers you pin prices at maximum until you don't need blackouts due to recovering supply (or you use some emergency legal authority to compel generation at some agreed price).

But that's not Texas.

†For a variety of reasons you won't be able to cleanly shed arbitrary amounts of demand, just slice off big chunks and hope, in the process you're probably going to kill people.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#174

Post by Nemo_bis »

AniseAbyss wrote: post #170
Nemo_bis wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So maybe you shouldn't sell high-risk financial products to poor people under the guise of an electricity contract.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#175

Post by salawat »

nickysielicki wrote: post #127
gizmo686 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What regulation are you referring to.

> Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) cited its “complete authority over ERCOT” to direct that ERCOT set pricing at $9/kWh until the grid could manage the outage situation after being ravaged by the freezing winter storm. from: https://www.griddy.com/post/griddy-update-why-energy-prices-... Prices should have fallen and did not.

The grid was under maximum demand. Heck, I was refreshing realtime statistics.

That was not an unrealistic policy decision. The unrealistic policy decision was leaving it stuck there even after things started to thaw and restore.

The market, as they say, she remains irrational far longer than you stay solvent.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#176

Post by TeMPOraL »

sephamorr wrote: post #160
aaomidi wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh my lord, what is this thinking. People have enough shit to be worried about than to worry about their power ticker going up and down. This is not something we should add as a burden to our citizens. Next I'm going to hear people wanting to short electricity.

'People' can simply choose a different electricity retailer if they want a constant rate and to not worry about this. If they were adequately informed about risks, why shouldn't we be allowed to choose our path? Industrial customers usually buy on the wholesale market, it doesn't seem a stretch that consumers could benefit from that too.

> If they were adequately informed about risks, why shouldn't we be allowed to choose our path?

That's a big if. In reality, they won't be adequately informed - they'll be at best adequately disinformed by the marketing departments of the power companies and third parties popping up around variable-pricing schemes. And to the extent exposing the customers to price variability is beneficial for the suppliers, the market has a nice way of removing the previously available options from the choice pool.

There's a spectrum between "let the people decide for themselves" and "the people will predictably decide to do something stupid and then they'll beg to be bailed out, so perhaps let's not offer that option", and I feel this may fall closer to that second end.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#177

Post by Nemo_bis »

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'm sorry, but calm down. This is not the end of [dynamic pricing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_pricing#Time-based_uti...). It's just the end of one specific company's model of assuming it could just make its customers shoulder unlimited financial losses.

See some examples which actually work in Norway, Finland and Estonia (connected to the [Nord Pool](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Pool)). http://www.eemg-mediators.eu/downloads/dynamic_pricing_in_el...

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#178

Post by benlumen »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #146
Robotbeat wrote: post #77

So, a thing I've been thinking of is that... because most people are on constant rate plans (where there isn't any incentive to cut back during a supply and/or demand crunch), the overall grid demand is a lot more inelastic than it would be if everyone where on a Griddy-like service. When, say, 75% of demand is insensitive to price signals, to get the 25% of demand that is sensitive to respond takes a MUCH bigger pri…

> show some estimate of the daily energy cost There’s a massive programme in the UK to fit homes with meters that do this. https://www.smartenergygb.org/en

I think the only people who are interested in them are those with money worries. To a lot of us it's unneccessary IOT tat and just another surveillance device to be honest.

Another electricity billing method in the UK that may or may not be a novelty to Americans are pay-as-you-go meters, typically fitted in houses that have had problems paying their bills on a monthly basis.

The meter has a card reader built in and you buy the top ups from shops (anywhere I think - newsagents, gas stations). When you put the card in it, it tops up the balance, and when it hits 0 it cuts you off. This happens at random times if you forget to do it, you can just get plunged into darkness whenever. It's pretty dickensian shit and you don't hear as much about them these days, but I think lots of houses still have them fitted.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#179

Post by thaumasiotes »

tialaramex wrote: post #173
thaumasiotes wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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??

Suppose there is apparent demand for 100GW of power. Due to faults your region's generators are only able to supply 75GW of power maximum no matter what price you offer. So you deliberately drop some groups of customers (rolling blackouts to residential areas). Now your residual demand (ignoring those customers freezing in the dark) sum to only 65GW†, you can supply them all. Great! If your system automatically adjus…

You seem to have omitted the part of the model that would explain why you want the price to be higher. You specify that

> your region's generators are only able to supply 75GW of power maximum no matter what price you offer.

Want 100GW all you like, you won't get there. What are you trying to accomplish?

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#180

Post by TeMPOraL »

salawat wrote: post #169
Nemo_bis wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

More recently - and still IMO OK - maybe you entered into more than 20 contracts in your life, but you were unlikely to have 20 contracts ongoing simultaneously. Today? I don't even know how many contracts or pseudo-contracts I'm involved in, but its in dozens.

That's my biggest reason I started to avoid SaaS and subscriptions as much as I can. Because every service you subscribe to is a relationship you enter, that you now have to manage, keep in mind. These add up quickly.

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