4WD
$50 site donor 2025
never heard of gritty griddy before the freeze … have shopped/lowered rates several times (fixed) …
we are a mile from the line providers regional yard … so the hardware side is good for us …
Some households in Texas face electricity bills of $10,000
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we are a mile from the line providers regional yard … so the hardware side is good for us …
Correct, except from the reports, the fixed rate providers were not processing transfer requests for 5 days, which coincidentally turned out to be just after the $9k/MWh spike ended.
Most of the plans are geared to people who aren’t exceptionally well suited at basic math. A lot of gimmicks, “two highest usage days free!” But 2x the rates on the other days.
if I were stuck in that situation I would have shut the power & water off and drained the pipes and found another place to go or crawled into a sleeping bag lol
edit: grammar
Sadly I think people who chose variable rate gas plans also fall into the group of people who don't know how to use a curb key to shut off their water. I mean look at all the tiktok videos of people filiming themselves crying while their homes flood from a burst pipe.. was their 1st priority to capture themselves crying so they could share it online? Why not prioritze finding a way to shut off the water?
4WD
$50 site donor 2025
Yeah … perhaps they didn’t learn from the ARM era … I’m even nervous around an adjustable wrench
4WD
$50 site donor 2025
I used to be on a Rural Electric Cooperative, and electricity was flat out expensive... all of the time.
But, they had a special meter that they could install. With this special meter, most of the time, you'd get electricity, super cheap. But when it got super cold, or super hot... the price per kilowatt would go sky high. They could only hit you with that rate for so many hours a day, but they could. Plus, they had the option of cutting you off completely for a few hours, during extreme peak loads.
With a fireplace, it wasn't so bad when it happened in the winter. In the summer, you'd have to shut off the AC or pay dearly.
These people with their enormous electricity bills were playing the system, and they knew what they signed up for. The problem is, they got caught. Time to pay the piper.
But, they had a special meter that they could install. With this special meter, most of the time, you'd get electricity, super cheap. But when it got super cold, or super hot... the price per kilowatt would go sky high. They could only hit you with that rate for so many hours a day, but they could. Plus, they had the option of cutting you off completely for a few hours, during extreme peak loads.
With a fireplace, it wasn't so bad when it happened in the winter. In the summer, you'd have to shut off the AC or pay dearly.
These people with their enormous electricity bills were playing the system, and they knew what they signed up for. The problem is, they got caught. Time to pay the piper.
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The headline tells only half the story. Oft times, the headline doesn't even line up with the story. At least in this case, the headline merely tells only half the story. The sensational part to grab your attention.
Which British company is that ?
gathermewool
Site Donor 2023
Yet another instance of posting before verifying/reading...
I’d say this has become MORE common, but it’s par for the course since I’ve been paying attention.
gathermewool
Site Donor 2023
Never read a headline before, huh?
I don’t know about you guys, but I surely don’t get my news solely from reading headlines.
In today’s day and age, news = click-bait, except for a rare few.
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No pity
I avoid every imaginable scheme. Sounds like Enron 2.0. Someone got rich while someone was fleeced.
How could they pay so much if the power was down everywhere and the meter not spinning?
Woe is me. I bought a Powerball ticket and didn't win. Should be in the news how so many get taken by the lottery commission.
I avoid every imaginable scheme. Sounds like Enron 2.0. Someone got rich while someone was fleeced.
How could they pay so much if the power was down everywhere and the meter not spinning?
Woe is me. I bought a Powerball ticket and didn't win. Should be in the news how so many get taken by the lottery commission.
One of many reasons I thought that deregulating gas/electric utilities was not a good idea...but no one asked me.
Spoken like a true Yankee. I noticed you were from Chicago.
I was born and raised in Louisiana, which was and still is a large natural gas producer. I vividly recall that people in Louisiana paid MORE for natural gas than the people in the Northeast during the years of regulated natural gas. Give thanks to Ted Kennedy and other powerful politicians for the low fixed prices set for the out of state market. In-state prices were not as tightly controlled, hence the higher prices. Deregulation occurred for one simply reason: the cost of getting the gas out of the ground was higher than the sale price. It was taking several years of gas sales for producers just to recoup their costs of drilling a new well before making a profit. So what happened: no one drilled new wells. When the supply started to rapidly disappear, the politicians realized they had to allow the price to rise or the supply would go to zero. I personally saw this as a teenager in Louisiana. I would go deer hunting in some off the beaten path areas, and every once in a while I would come across a natural gas well sitting in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by pine trees and blackberry thickets. I asked someone who was in the petroleum industry if these were abandoned wellheads. He told me that most were actually viable wells, but the price of running a extension pipeline (and building a road, etc.) to the main pipe line was not economical. Once gas was deregulated, the price was allowed to rise, the roads and pipe lines were built, and a lot of these wells were brought on line. Hence end of supply shortages. Now to present day. Fracking and more importantly horizontally drilling have allowed the smaller pockets of gas to be economically extracted. So much has come on line that the supply has greatly exceeded demand, and the price of natural gas has been very low for the last couple years. This has been a two edged sword as many utilities are closing their coal plants (and some nuclear plants) and building natural gas turbine generators, since natural gas prices are presently very low and it only emits about half the CO2 of a coal plant. The government has been pushing utilities toward this path with the ever increasing restrictions on coal plants and coal burning. The end result is a large increase in natural gas demand, but the supply so far has keep up with the demand. When the polar vortex hit, that changed QUICKLY. Several factors are at play for the present outages. The most obvious is that natural gas demand for the whole country went up sharply as the temperatures dropped. Natural gas for home heating takes precedent over electricity and industry (as it should), and so the feds ordered a cutback on natural gas supplies to non home heating customers. So a second whammy occurs in that a lot of electrical generation goes offline or is reduced. In Texas, where quite a bit of electricity is generated by wind, another whammy occurs (and apparently did occur). The wind turbine blades have to be flexible enough to withstand the stresses imposed by varying wind speeds, etc. In very cold weather, they lose this flexibility, and will become rigid enough to fail if over stressed. Hence, during a vortex event, the windmills will be taken offline to prevent blade failure. Third whammy. There is even a fourth whammy. When the temperatures get far below freezing, heat pumps don't work worth very well, and everyone has to use supplemental electrical heating. So in a extreme vortex event, electricity demand is skyrocketing, you just lost most of the wind and natural gas generation and everyone acts surprised that a lot of people are sitting in the dark.
I lived in Ann Arbor, MI for five years, and one thing that was readily apparent to me was that natural gas is much more valuable for home heating than for generating electricity. It gets freaking cold up north in winter. Every year is a "polar vortex" as my friend from Chicago will probably testify in agreement. Save the natural gas for home heating.
So what about solar. One little problem. Only 8-10 hours of sunlight a day year round, at BEST. In Ann Arbor, from Nov 1st to April 1st, you would be lucky to get two weeks total of sunny days. I learned first hand the true meaning of the phrase "cabin fever".
I constantly hear the politicians and others talks about renewables and carbon free generation, etc. But how do you instantly replace tens of Gigawatts of electricity production, so we are talking when the wind suddenly stops or the sun is not shining?
As we shut down more coal plants and nuclear plants in favor of natural gas and renewables, this is going to be repeated in more places and more often, even without a polar vortex. It will be interesting to see how this all works out.
Disclaimer: I am a nuclear engineer, so my biases are out in the open.
A lot of people didn’t think they would get bit on variable rate home mortgages either. You could have gotten a whole house propane generator installed for $7,000-$8,000 and limit your cost to propane you already own, but how many Texans did that? I am pretty sure those spot-price contracts for electricity supply are binding and enforceable.
Not even new.
I recall back in 1999 when we had the "alleged" budget surplus. WaPo had a headline saying something to the effect of "Greenspan Against Refunding Surplus to Taxpayers"
An actual read of the story showed it was third in line for how he would deal with the surplus.
So not against it, just not his first choice.
So not even an "In today's day and age" thing. Headlines have been sensationalist and often misleading for generations.
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