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Griddy Is Shutting Down

griddy.com

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Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#251

Post by supertrope »

opo wrote: post #236
irrational wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>... 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. 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.

Net metering is a temporary state intended to build critical mass and get mass production going. Solar panel owners don't pay the full cost of grid services, and utilities are not paying them for the full value of the electricity fed back in.

Residential solar IMO is mal-investment because grid scale solar has better economies of scale. Solar plants are easier to maintain. The grid is not built for widespread net metering. Rooftop solar has more fatalities than nuclear because of installers falling off.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#252

Post by supertrope »

fastball wrote: post #208
freeone3000 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except during events like this, that people are not and cannot be prepared for. Griddy going out of business is nothing -- if someone else wants to take up the business model, they can tomorrow. Individual people being charged thousands for debts difficult to discharge is the real harm.

Pro-tip: if the rates are really high, stop using so much power. What happened to personal responsibility?

Many customers requested a supplier switch but could not get it to execute for days.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#253

Post by supertrope »

Robotbeat wrote: post #214
toast0 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bit of an issue in that you don't really want to run your generator for too many hours. I think mine wants service every 100 hours or every year whichever comes first. Maybe 100 hours is enough for actual backup and substantial peak shaving though; I certainly haven't studied the spot prices in TX, as I wouldn't live there. ;) If you had local battery storage, and decent forecasting for house demand and spo…

100 hours is quite a long time. If the wholesale electricity price is $9/kWh during these super peaks and you have a 10kW generator, that’s $9000.

After spending $10K on a generator.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#254

Post by hakfoo »

imtringued wrote: post #194
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -…

Texas willingly made those decisions in exchange for cheap but unreliable power. The question is, if you have unreliable power how do you deal with it when there isn't enough? >Price discovery and rationing are ineffective mitigations for the irrational self-harming effects of poor strategic decisions caused by prioritising economic ideology over physical integrity. They are effective. High prices tell consumers to t…

The problem with price discovery is that it's a Homo Economicus sort of solution. A fully rational consumer with full information will react as intended. In the real world, it fails because it requires real-time information distribution and reaction.

In the best case, they sent out a message to all their customers: "Your power prices are about to quintuple, disconnect now."

Some of those messages will bounce or be delayed. Some will arrive to people who can't read them immediately (in car, asleep, out of reach of device, doing something else). The people who actually do read the message then have to go around trying to adjust things-- hitting overloaded provider-change services, or scurrying around in the breaker box or running around the house pulling cords-- while the clock is ticking.

It might work if you eliminate the real-time decision process. I'm envisioning a modernized version of the central breaker box, where you could indicate on a per-circuit level the cut points. The decorative fountain pump cuts off at 8 cents per kWh, the kitchen appliances at 25, and the circuit running the mini-fridge containing your perishable medications will keep chugging at basically any price. This can be modeled and ran through simulations. You'd have to set this up during onboarding, and for optimal value, the house would have to be designed around it, to place outlets on different circuits where it could be useful.

But even that needs a need liability fallback if they don't relay the data accurately-- if a message is lost in communication and the house still thinks electricity is 10c/kWh, when it's $10, who's going to eat the difference? Who'd trust the system with that much money at risk?

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#255

Post by m463 »

astrange wrote: post #248
imtringued wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you have less children you put more resources into each child.

Aren't we talking about not having any kids at all here? It takes a bit less than 3x resources to have 3 kids though, since they share things.

also, children at some point might be might be like factorio, where the early ones start gathering resources for the later ones :)

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#256

Post by [deleted] »

myself248 wrote: post #32
Analemma_ wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree completely. This business model should never have been allowed to exist, in the same way and for the same reason that " almost fully self-driving cars" should not be allowed on the roads: humans are just not capable of quickly and correctly responding in situations where 99.99% of the time no input is required and once in a blue moon you have to act immediately to avoid disaster. Good riddance.

I would love the opportunity to sign up for this, if and only if they could send me some test messages so I could make sure my load-shedding scripts work. The opportunity to engage more directly with the market would be cool and useful for folks with the technical chops to participate appropriately. And if everyone's smart appliances and bitcoin miners could actually cut themselves off with price spikes, _the grid wo…

[deleted]

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#257

Post by fastball »

orwin wrote: post #215
Dma54rhs wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market price is literally there for them as a signal when to generate and when to not. That's the whole point of the market.

A market is extremelly inneficient at managing a pwer grid, unless you install HFT computers at each power plant.

What is more efficient, and do you have numbers to back that up?

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#258

Post by reducesuffering »

opo wrote: post #236
irrational wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>... 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. 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.

Hardly. My "access" bill is $20/mth, but my panels give $350/yr more to the grid than I use. PGE gives me like $30 of that back at the end of the year. So that $12 / $20 doesn't tell the whole story. They are also likely giving a lot more renewable energy to the grid that isn't compensated and is more like another $30/mth of cost.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#259

Post by airhead969 »

Robotbeat wrote: post #225
airhead969 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (incl…

Energy consumption for home use during a blizzard is very inelastic. Energy consumption for empty hotels and office buildings should be very elastic rather than sitting idle, lights on, and HVAC blasting. Nonessential businesses that consume large quantities of electricity should be cut first before residential areas.

Re: Griddy Is Shutting Down

#260

Post by sephamorr »

ubercow13 wrote: post #185
sephamorr wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'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.

I mean, what you're suggesting is what was allowed. And look what happened (OP). Not a particularly surprising outcome.

People lose money in the stock market all the time. This feels similar to me--people bet on the market and were on the wrong side of the trade. I do have sympathy for people who are having financial trouble as a result of their decisions here, but there isn't serious talk about banning speculation on stock markets because some investors might make bad trades.
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