| 1. Time-of-use plans have an app or web portal into which a customer can log into. (Actually, most providers in Texas these days have a real-time portal customers can use simply because smart metering enables it.) 2. Yep, my parents were, and they will never use a time-of-use plan ever again. 3. No. I made a spreadsheet and, based on my math their being bit by this in mid-2019 would have not paid off prior to this event. Circling back to 2 for a moment, the problem is not so much with the plans, it is with all of the unmet caveats that the author lists in the article. For my parents, they were pitched this plan on a visit to the State Fair of Texas where the salesperson told them they could "save thousands of dollars" every year by not "lining the pockets of big energy." Sure, they know how Griddy operates now, but what about some new clever scheme another provider comes up with that winds up biting them? That's why they're on fixed-rate plans forever. Not a single person told them the downsides of this plan, the virtually-unlimited (sorry, but a $9/kWh cap when wholesale electricity is usually $0.02-$0.04/kWh and retail is around $0.115/kWh, is not a cap) cost exposure, and the near-impossibility of taking effective action (it is unreasonable to tell customers to go outside and hit the main breaker in a winter storm). Texas came up with a system where retail electric customers are willingly offered plans in which they need to be near-experts in the price of natural gas derivatives and spot-generation electrical wholesale rates...and are not told in advance about this requirement. |
Granted, if the cost savings were enough, a homeowner could install a battery/genset backup with the savings and have that automatically switch over when prices got nuts, but that's not within the abilities or even mindset of most people.