First: I'm no expert. I'm just googling & trying to understand all this. Please point out any mistakes that I've made. Anyways, I was trying to get a handle on all of this, and the way I read it, a whole bunch of people were signed up for Griddy, which charges them $10 per month for electricity at spot prices. When there is a glut of electricity, spot prices go negative, and they actually get paid to use electricity. The idea is you have an app on your phone to track pricing, updated every 15 minutes, and can make decisions on whether to turn the heat up or a/c down, or whether you want to be using the welder in the shop that day. Griddy talks to smart thermostats, and it decides when to turn your heat up or down, based on current price, or it will turn your pool pump or whatever around the house off when the price goes above a point you specify. According to Griddy, their Texas customers averaged paying 2.6 cents per kilowatt hour in 2020. That worked great for a long time, until prices went up to ~$9 per kwh after the blizzard. For comparison, I'm paying supposedly 13 cents per kwh in Michigan, but the real rate with the add-ons is more like 20 cents. I haven't looked at other states, but would guess that we're a bit above average? Personally, I think that I'm pretty efficient; my utility says I used 300 kwh this past December, so this would have been the scenario. Michigan pricing: 300 kwh was ~$50.00 Texas (Griddy) pricing (2020): 300 kwh would have been ~$7.80 + their $10 monthly charge. (I don't know if 2020 was a particularly cheap year or not, I just grabbed those numbers) Texas (Griddy) pricing (blizzard): 300 kwh would have been ~$2,700 Google says that the average residential customer uses 10,909 kwh per year, so in 2020 this would cost: Michigan pricing: $2,181.80 Texas pricing (2020): $403.63 I think that seeing the news headlines that people were getting $10,000 electric bills caught everyone's attention, and I'm not trying to minimize how it puts a crunch on you to see your utility bill skyrocket. That being said, if my math is right, using Griddy, and buying at spot prices saved the average Texas household $1,778.17 in 2020 vs. the average Michigan household. They would only have to use Griddy for 6 years to make that $10k back, if they had to pay what electricity costs me. And knowing how the media works, they found the person that had the highest bill, and that is where the $10k number is coming from. If someone had a $5k bill, they make that back in 3 years by not paying Michigan prices, and so on.
I think your math is good, but imagine your account getting hit for 5 or 10K tonight. They have that griddy thing linked right to a card or account & hit you immediately. Imagine people trying to buy essentials after the storm with a huge negative in their bank accounts. An algorithm determines price per kwh based on current demand. On top of that the EPA denied Texas utilities an emergency exemption to generate power at full capacity for NG & coal plants which exacerbated the problem. End result was/is some real bad situations & deaths that could have been avoided to an extent.
I can imagine that it's a punch in the gut to see that... I'd be screaming as well. I hadn't picked up that it was an immediate debit. Thanks for that bit of info, amateur cutter. And I certainly don't want to minimize any suffering or deaths... I'm just trying to understand the headlines I see. I suspect that my calculations were a bit low as well, because I didn't include taxes, and there have to be fees to pay for the transmission grid in there somehow, so maybe I was 10 or 20% low as a guess? I see that Griddy is now accusing the Public Utility Commission of arbitrarily setting the $9.00 price, and keeping it there for a couple of days after power was restored. I will be keeping an eye on it to see how it all plays out.
"No, according to U.S. Energy documents. The request was granted, but included a warning that ERCOT not exceed the amount of generation absolutely needed to restore power and keep Texas homes warm."
