OK, I'm lazily speculating here about Texas electricity...

[Ombligo]

I believe most understood that rates could go up and were willing to take that risk - no one thought it would go up as high and as quickly as it did. It was unreasonable to ever expect a normal person to foresee what took place. That is not to say that a safe stop should not have been in place. At the very least, part of the enrollment process should have included a max-rate that someone would be willing to pay - rates hits that mark and your power is cut until you approve further

[hal]

I'm sure that when people read 'variable' they were thinking maybe at worst there would be a quick 20% price jump - maybe some realized the price could double for a short period. I'm sure no one, not one thought they would be dealing increases of many 1000s%.

And I'm sure many more simply looked to see what the cheapest option was and took it not really even understanding what a variable rate might be - maybe 'variable' means 'cheap'.

[pdq]

vision63 wrote: ... it was the impression that voting for Republicans would somehow look out for their real and best interests. They lost that for sure. The state needs to step up asap.

When you believe government is the problem, it’s no surprise that you end up with dysfunctional government.

[space-time]

So this jump from $50 to $9000 per Megawatt-hour was only temporary for a few days, right? do they keep track of how much power you used Feb 1-15 and how much you used Feb 16-21? or the rate can probably change by the hour. Do the keep track of usage in real time?

[bfd]

Many PoCos track your real-time use, and depending on your metering system, they could conceivably charge at real-time/demand rates. That's the goal anyway… Whether or not Texas PoCos are doing this is up for speculation, but the technology is everywhere.

For example, with a few keystrokes, we can get instant data on usage. Having solar, it's part of the monitoring system. It's the same data the PoCo is getting. Important to them because they have to pay for any electricity produced here that goes back into the grid. So knowing at what time that juice is flowing, and which direction it's flowing is important. Everyone in Cali is headed for time-of-use (TOU)metering. And it's a really small step to make TOU dynamic … Brave new energy world.

[Acer]

We get offers every so often to "lock in" our price. The offers are a sign to me that prices are going to drop. Technically, I am at risk of being "Texassed" but I have no reason to expect that we would. We even missed out on the great Northeast Blackout of 2003. Did that event produce $10,000 electric bills?

[Bill in NC]

Sarcany wrote:
I've been reading a lot about this. I think I have a basic understanding of it.

In Texas, there is little or no competition in power generation, but there is in power-reselling.

Power generating companies sell power to "retailers" at "wholesale" rates. (In many cases, they are both the monopoly suppliers and the retailers... There are also power-transmitters that sit between generators and retailers.)

Retailers sell power to consumers. Local governments can make exclusive deals with retailers to resell power in their communities, typically at fixed-rates or tied to both usage and peak-demand, but capped. (Usually the caps are pretty high because the power companies have a lot of political influence, but they try not to price it so high as to invite lawsuits or regulatory scrutiny from the feds.) But it's a bit of a wild West environment elsewhere. In several regions, reselling is open to anyone who files the right papers and has a few bucks to install power-meters.

Municipal power resellers controlled by local authorities do exist, but Texas law does not favor them because they introduce competition and usually result in higher quality service at lower rates, which is seen by the state legislature as "anti-competitive."

In some communities, "wholesalers" have come in, essentially the same as retailers, but they resell power at or near wholesale rates. These rates are highly variable and depend upon the state of the current market as well as metered demand. Often, using a wholesale energy provider will save money, but it comes at a risk of paying much more than your neighbors when the market turns. Even wholesalers are capped, but the caps are nonsensically high. Griddy's domestic service was capped between $9,000-$10,000 per megawatt hour. Before the storm, wholesale power was sitting around $30 per megawatt hour.

Wholesalers aren't popular. They're new. This model of selling energy came from California after decades of Enron-style abuse over there. (Remember the fake energy crisis they engineered just to raise prices?) In Texas, "Griddy" had something around 29,000 wholesale customers. Most of these customers probably had a choice between 2-3 retailers and might even have been able to use a high quality municipal power company, but they were sold on the wholesale model by a powerful ad campaign styled around "disrupting" culture. ("Disrupt" being a popular word in advertising meaning "we don't have a real business model.")

Municipal electric rates here remain substantially more expensive than buying retail from the utility, e.g.:

https://www.electricitylocal.com/states/...beth-city/