231–240 of 267 posts
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A company getting blown up by counter party risk doesn't sound like regulation. That's the free market at work.
It's not exactly the free market when ERCOT fixes the price. https://www.griddy.com/post/griddy-update-why-energy-prices-... See the big image midway through the article.
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??
What the regulators wanted to do was lock in the demand at "all of Texas wants electricity" until such time as that could be provided.
It's sort of funny that this "super free market" system Texas set up failed in so many different ways. Without this massive government intervention, Texas would still be in the dark because customers in the dark can't demand more electricity and therefore utilities wouldn't have any demand to supply enough electricity to turn them on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not exactly the free market when ERCOT fixes the price. https://www.griddy.com/post/griddy-update-why-energy-prices-... See the big image midway through the article.
It literally doesn't matter if custumers can't afford to pay the fixed price, much less the "true" price. And they can't.
?
I'm not trying to claim that prices didn't naturally rise by a lot, but in that particular situation (linked above), it's very clear that a lot of customers were paying $9/kWh when they could have paid $0.03/kWh. The latter is obviously easier to afford.
This event sucked for griddy customers, no doubt. But for the state of Texas and ERCOT to lock the price 300x higher than it would otherwise be is ridiculous.
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…
What happens to Griddy customers? Do they just lose power until they can be onboarded with other providers?
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…
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…
Wow. If you are only paying $12 a month for access to the grid, you are paying a small fraction of your share of the cost of maintaining the grid. These consumer solar subsidies are a massive subsidy from the poor to the wealthy and really aren't sustainable.
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Does anywhere else in the world sell electricity like this?
In the UK 'variable rate' tariffs are common, usually updated monthly. Octopus' is daily, and also offers an hourly plan 'Agile' with an API. There is a regulatory cap on the cost of energy, which is a bit convoluted, but Octopus passes it on as a 35p/kWh cap on variable rate plans.
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.
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…
What happens to Griddy customers? Do they just lose power until they can be onboarded with other providers?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I always wonder how people can fight tooth and nail for something small and local like their neighborhood to never change and then once there is a global phenomenon that is directly threatening the culture of every human on the planet they don't give a damn. How is your neighborhood supposed to stay the same if the planet is getting hotter over time? It might only be 1°C right now but since nobody really cares we are…
Now compare this with voter turnout by age bracket, and the current path of the world is pretty easy to see as people looking out for their own best interest, which is rational and what we are hardwired to do.