[rococode]

Their Wikipedia page has more context, seems like those stories of Texans getting $1000+ electricity bills and the recent class-action lawsuit involved this company (I'd only seen headlines and didn't know the company's name until now):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griddy

Griddy is an American power retailer that sells energy to people in the state of Texas at wholesale prices for a $10 monthly membership fee and has approximately 29,000 members. The company itself is based in California.

During the 2021 Texas power crisis, Griddy received attention for urging its customers to leave the company. Some Griddy customers signed up for wholesale variable rates plans allowed by the Texas deregulated electricity market, found themselves facing over $5,000 bills for five days of service during the storm.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas caps the wholesale price of electricity at $9,000 per megawatt-hour, which translates to $9 per kilowatt-hour. Customers had seen the wholesale rates hit that high previously in August 2019, but only for a 90 minute period, which the company then noted was an unprecedented long time at that price. During the February 2021 storm wholesale rates, and therefore Griddy's rates, were at the maximum for about four days. On February 15, during the power crisis, the state's Public Utility Commission required ERCOT to set the price to the $9,000 maximum. The commission reasoned that the trading prices for energy (as low as $1,200) were inconsistent with the supply scarcity. The following week, one Chambers County customer filed a proposed class action lawsuit alleging price gouging and seeking $1B in relief.

On February 26, ERCOT ejected Griddy from the Texas market for nonpayment.

[tmpz22]

What happens to Griddy customers? Do they just lose power until they can be onboarded with other providers?

[brianwawok]

It's not like they take down your power line and run a new one. It's just a software switch flip on who has to chase down your money for a bill..

[bradj]

They can easily switch to other retail power providers. There are other services in Texas that you can subscribe to that will automatically switch your retail provider based on whoever happens to be providing the best deal on any particular day.

[anotherQuarter]

If they don’t switch to another provider they are automatically switched to a provider of last resort (POLR) which is a predetermined provider based on ERCOT policy.

[thaumasiotes]

> On February 15, during the power crisis, the state's Public Utility Commission required ERCOT to set the price to the $9,000 maximum. The commission reasoned that the trading prices for energy (as low as $1,200) were inconsistent with the supply scarcity.

Huh??

[tialaramex]

Suppose there is apparent demand for 100GW of power. Due to faults your region's generators are only able to supply 75GW of power maximum no matter what price you offer. So you deliberately drop some groups of customers (rolling blackouts to residential areas). Now your residual demand (ignoring those customers freezing in the dark) sum to only 65GW†, you can supply them all. Great!

If your system automatically adjusts price to hit demand it will begin reducing the price, after all demand is lower than supply, how about $6000? $3000? $1200? Ah, that seems to be the magic number. At $1200 we can get 65GW of power.

But wait, we don't want 65GW of power. We want 100GW of power, the fact we can't have that means rolling blackouts. It makes no sense to cause rolling blackouts and reduce prices, the prices need to stay high until we can actually supply everybody.

In a more sensibly architected system, low priority industrial users are blacked out first, and if you must have rolling blackouts for residential customers you pin prices at maximum until you don't need blackouts due to recovering supply (or you use some emergency legal authority to compel generation at some agreed price).

But that's not Texas.

†For a variety of reasons you won't be able to cleanly shed arbitrary amounts of demand, just slice off big chunks and hope, in the process you're probably going to kill people.

[anotherQuarter]

The basis of this argument is that there were generators who were waiting for prices to go higher before going online. I don’t believe that was the case here. Plants weren’t able to come online because natural gas lines, piles of coal, wind turbines, nuclear coolant water were freezing over and could not be used.

I don’t know the right answer but forcing electricity rates to the highest allowed limit for a week allowed these generators to make insane amount of money and i’m convinced it improved the outcome of this whole disaster.

[thaumasiotes]

You seem to have omitted the part of the model that would explain why you want the price to be higher. You specify that

> your region's generators are only able to supply 75GW of power maximum no matter what price you offer.

Want 100GW all you like, you won't get there. What are you trying to accomplish?

[tialaramex]

As I understand it, Texas hopes to stimulate supply by offering higher prices. Does that work? Well, it clearly works to some extent normally.

If your legislature (not to mention local culture) has insisted you must only use a hammer, those screws are getting hammered in, too bad.

If you have greater import/export capacity the higher prices ensure you're importing. In this particular case that would likely have made no difference, it's not as though the storm was just affecting Texas, but in other cases or with a smaller deficit that might save your backside.

Also as I understand it, some places pay generators for their capacity to deliver power if it were needed, even if in fact they're never needed. So that can be a better plan because it makes the incentive not to fail clearer.

[Arnt]

Most places do, AIUI.

I've actually been at a power plant where one block has never been switched on (except for maintenance). The block is there because it can be switched on, if necessary.

The texans wanted low prices and structured their pricing 100% for that: Power generators are paid 100% for being cheapest. Most other places use a combination of low pricing and availability, and the regulator will award contracts for availability to various generators that have different failure modes.

[jellicle]

At the time, the regulatory agency had ordered load-shedding of something like 1/3rd (more? I forget) of all Texas customers due to insufficient power. 1/3rd of Texas was in the dark. So what happened was the market was establishing a new clearing price based on the new, lesser demand for electricity.

What the regulators wanted to do was lock in the demand at "all of Texas wants electricity" until such time as that could be provided.

It's sort of funny that this "super free market" system Texas set up failed in so many different ways. Without this massive government intervention, Texas would still be in the dark because customers in the dark can't demand more electricity and therefore utilities wouldn't have any demand to supply enough electricity to turn them on.