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Griddy Is Shutting Down

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Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#221

Post by airhead969 »

Robotbeat wrote: post #211
panta82 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Electricity should be something that just exists, as an ambiance around you. That you pay a predictable, modest monthly bill, and can than focus on other things. Who needs the drama of free markets there? Also applies to net neutrality and health-care btw.

The electricity price is not low if you use it without consideration of cost. Why bother with LED lights, heat-pumps, or proper insulation if you’re totally insensitive to the cost of electricity? What happens in such situations is electricity ends up being rationed with rolling blackouts. Or, if you manage to produce enough anyway by massive government investment, per capita energy usage skyrockets. The former situa…

I think it depends on how much it costs and the environmental impact of energy generation and transmission. There's a continuum between austerity taxing a resource for insane frugality, moderate pricing, and giving it away that has to be deliberately comsidered.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#222

Post by airhead969 »

wmf wrote: post #114
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.

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

Better put a fuse or GFCI on that.

I remember the Cal ISO rolling blackouts of 2000-2001.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#223

Post by aaomidi »

Robotbeat wrote: post #211
panta82 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Electricity should be something that just exists, as an ambiance around you. That you pay a predictable, modest monthly bill, and can than focus on other things. Who needs the drama of free markets there? Also applies to net neutrality and health-care btw.

The electricity price is not low if you use it without consideration of cost. Why bother with LED lights, heat-pumps, or proper insulation if you’re totally insensitive to the cost of electricity? What happens in such situations is electricity ends up being rationed with rolling blackouts. Or, if you manage to produce enough anyway by massive government investment, per capita energy usage skyrockets. The former situa…

By adding a carbon tax and a carbon offset refund.

Put the responsibility on the generators, not consumers.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#224

Post by kenmacd »

panta82 wrote: post #147
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.

Exactly. Electricity should be something that just exists, as an ambiance around you. That you pay a predictable, modest monthly bill, and can than focus on other things. Who needs the drama of free markets there? Also applies to net neutrality and health-care btw.

I don't know. It seems there can be quite an effect by shifting usage even slightly as power generation has to be real-time and handling the peaks costs up all more.

Free-market pricing seems wrong, as would per-minute pricing, but something like a 3-window (on-peak, off-peak, standard) time-of-day rate seems more acceptable.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#225

Post by Robotbeat »

airhead969 wrote: post #221
Robotbeat wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The electricity price is not low if you use it without consideration of cost. Why bother with LED lights, heat-pumps, or proper insulation if you’re totally insensitive to the cost of electricity? What happens in such situations is electricity ends up being rationed with rolling blackouts. Or, if you manage to produce enough anyway by massive government investment, per capita energy usage skyrockets. The former situa…

I think it depends on how much it costs and the environmental impact of energy generation and transmission. There's a continuum between austerity taxing a resource for insane frugality, moderate pricing, and giving it away that has to be deliberately comsidered.

Moderate pricing is the right move. But a lot of folks are missing my main point here: The more people and businesses are on fixed rates, the more inelastic demand is and therefore the more extreme the pricing swings are for those who are on moderate real-time pricing plans. We need to make real-time pricing as broad as possible so the price extremes are much smaller. and make it more feasible for small players (including middle class individuals) to contribute directly to supply.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#226

Post by to11mtm »

Robotbeat wrote: post #205
sokoloff wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they were (and knew they were) being charged $9/kWh for days on end, the occupants of those buildings would have shed the wasteful lighting loads for you.

Precisely. Residential areas should maybe be the ONLY places where a fixed rate would be allowed. Everywhere else (commercial, industrial, etc) should have to have real-time pricing. That would reduce the swings in price since demand would be much more elastic.

This would have the potential for nice second-order effects.

I'm thinking about places in AZ/NV where some companies and even some municipality groups (i.e. bureaucratic/permitting type) have moved towards four 10 hour days instead of five 8 hour days.

This is a bit better for those employees QOL (since they get 3 day weekends all the time) and also benefited the employers since they could lower their power consumption for an additional day.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#227

Post by ocschwar »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #136
ocschwar wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

Thankfully, you cannot participate in a real time electricity market if you don't have millions of dollars of copper, steel and aluminum installed to generate or use it.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#228

Post by sokoloff »

to11mtm wrote: post #226
Robotbeat wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. Residential areas should maybe be the ONLY places where a fixed rate would be allowed. Everywhere else (commercial, industrial, etc) should have to have real-time pricing. That would reduce the swings in price since demand would be much more elastic.

This would have the potential for nice second-order effects. I'm thinking about places in AZ/NV where some companies and even some municipality groups (i.e. bureaucratic/permitting type) have moved towards four 10 hour days instead of five 8 hour days. This is a bit better for those employees QOL (since they get 3 day weekends all the time) and also benefited the employers since they could lower their power consumpti…

Or could cause a clawback of some of those by companies realizing that if they went back to 5x8, one of their days would be cheaper power because the 4x10 companies wouldn’t be operating on one of those days.

Or “if we took Wednesdays off instead of Fridays, we’d benefit from Friday power being cheaper than Wednesday power”.

I still think market-aware power metering is a good thing for large users.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#229

Post by nonfamous »

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…

And it’s not about the “dumb poors” either. I’m a data scientist and and I signed up for a variable-rate plan like this when I used to live in Chicago. I watched my electricity consumption closely, and diligently reduced my consumption via home automation when I got alerts about price spikes. I thought it was great, and I saved money. (Charging the Tesla overnight was basically free.) I figured there might be periods where things were 2x or 3x more expensive than usual, and I could absorb such costs.

But I never in my wildest dreams imagined that rates would shoot to 100x normal values for days on end. The very claims of “it’s market driven!” made me think that was impossible - how could any efficient market sustain such prices?

Realizing now that I dodged a bullet.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#230

Post by anotherQuarter »

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…

The basis of this argument is that there were generators who were waiting for prices to go higher before going online. I don’t believe that was the case here. Plants weren’t able to come online because natural gas lines, piles of coal, wind turbines, nuclear coolant water were freezing over and could not be used.

I don’t know the right answer but forcing electricity rates to the highest allowed limit for a week allowed these generators to make insane amount of money and i’m convinced it improved the outcome of this whole disaster.

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