>Wholesale power prices on Texas’ main power grid hit the ceiling price of $9,000 per megawatt hour for parts of five straight days. That was exponentially higher than the average price, which was $21.18 per megawatt hour in 2020, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or Ercot, the nonprofit that controls the grid.
>Now power retailers and municipal utilities are trying to figure out how to pass on the billions of dollars in costs to customers, some of whom face bills in the thousands of dollars that may need to be stretched out over time.
This is about 29k Texans who use a service called Griddy to "hack" their way to better utility rates by choosing to pay the wholesale price, which can fluctuate rapidly and has burned subscribers before (but not to this extent).
Griddy users are not the poor. They are lifehacker-types.
99% of Texans pay a fixed rate. I ran utilities nonstop during the freeze (three furnaces, pool filter, applicances) and my utility bill for that week was $23.
My Texas utility bills are 33% of what I paid in California.
Every time this story is posted, people are hyperventilating without realizing that this is mostly a self-inflicted wound for a tiny minority.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 15.8 ms ] thread>Now power retailers and municipal utilities are trying to figure out how to pass on the billions of dollars in costs to customers, some of whom face bills in the thousands of dollars that may need to be stretched out over time.
Griddy users are not the poor. They are lifehacker-types.
99% of Texans pay a fixed rate. I ran utilities nonstop during the freeze (three furnaces, pool filter, applicances) and my utility bill for that week was $23.
My Texas utility bills are 33% of what I paid in California.
Every time this story is posted, people are hyperventilating without realizing that this is mostly a self-inflicted wound for a tiny minority.