241–250 of 267 posts
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Do you have any documentation or recommended reads for how and what you did? I've been thinking of doing something similar but wondering what parts make most sense to automate
Most likely heating and cooling is what take up the cast majority of your bill, unless you have something more unusual going on.
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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.
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…
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…
Now that said, having an electric system where this is necessary is itself a market failure.
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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…
Let me address the H20 issue with the runaway global warming theory.
There is literally an ocean of H20, therefore the total load of H2O is elastic (unlike CO2). Hotter temperature -> more H2O in the atmosphere -> hotter temperature -> repeat.
Yet this hasn’t happened. The point about water condensing is besides the point, because water is also vaporizing and the equilibrium point is determined by temperature, which the runaway theory says is a divergent phenomenon.
Let’s rewrite the original assertion:
Higher Temperature -> Higher water vapor equilibrium —> higher temperature. This cycle can repeat endlessly because of the ocean.
As far as independent scientist doing global warming research on their own dime, this just isn’t true. There is public and private money set aside to study this.
Highly credentialed global warming skeptics like Judith Curry have generated around ~150 papers which conclude that global alarmism over human caused global warming is a “hoax”. Her actual words.
Astoundingly, there is a complete media blackout on this scientist and others like her. Infact a huge case the msm won’t cover anymore is the case of Tim Ball who decried global warming alarmism as pseudo science (Corruption of Climate Science Has Created 30 Lost Years," Jan 10, 2011).
He was sued for defamation by Michael Mann, the same person who was caught up in email scandal or manipulating climate data.
Tim Ball went to court and got discovery of Michael Mann’s climate date. 10 years later, the judge finally dismissed the case because Michael Mann failed to produce the data by the judges orders.
This is not “science” this is a religion run by a corrupt cartel.
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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…
Texas saw similar temps in late January, 2011, highs around 20°F, lows near zero. That was ten years ago. There weren't widespread outages.
ERCOT's planning excluded that recent history.
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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…
If you had told people in Texas that it’s going to cost $200 per hour to run their heat, people would have responded by dramatically cutting consumption and the blackouts would not have been required. Now that said, having an electric system where this is necessary is itself a market failure.
They couldn't.
Either people still got hit by massive bills (thousands or tens of thousands of dollars), or they cut usage (voluntarily or otherwise) and froze to death or poisoned themselves trying not to.
Municipal water and sewerage perations couldn't function. Pipes froze and burst. Massive damage precipitated by underprovisioning, risk-shifting to the most vulnerable, and a gamble that lost.
Life ain't textbook neat.
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That's more relative than absolute expectations, or maybe you just know a lot of neurotic people. Even if climate change is as bad as WW2 (doubtful over the same time scale), people still had children then, and they still had children when every city was covered in a foot of horse poop, all your kids died at 14 and doctors didn't believe in handwashing. In fact they had more!
As you have less children you put more resources into each child.
It takes a bit less than 3x resources to have 3 kids though, since they share things.
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Enron beat them to the game by like 20 years on this!
But the power to mindlessly gamble must be democratised!
Now, not only did Griddy put its users at risk of high bills with these prices, the utilities bankrupted themselves putting these bids in too. The wind farm operators could only laugh while they were getting these crazy bids for every watt from a turbine that wasn't iced up, because they knew they were getting paid with imaginary money, and they were operating the windmills because what the hell else could you do?
The nat gas operators, well, they needed real money because they needed to buy gas at crazy prices, and the nat gas drillers needed money to get crews out to thaw out their infrastructure, which is extra important because we're talking about working outdoors in dangerous weather, and the crews are Texans that had not seen weather like this before.
So TLDR, none of this makes any sense, and it will be settled in bankruptcy court.
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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.