[nickysielicki]

This fucking sucks. I'm angry.

I have a pretty dark outlook when it comes to global warming, but when you're a griddy customer and you're watching your meter constantly, it just made sense. For a brief moment in time, a green future based on renewables felt realistic. For a brief moment in time, I felt like we might actually be able to meet carbon emission goals.

When it cost a lot to make electricity, I used less. When it cost very little, I used freely. When I was able to get paid to put a load on the grid, I sure as hell did. And whenever I was thinking about this, I was able to realize that everyone who wasn't a griddy customer was not remotely aware of what was going on with wind turbines nearby. Anyone on a flat rate plan set their themostat and forgot about it, because the cost to run their AC was fixed. Whereas when the wind wasn't blowing and it was hot out, I was aware that it meant burning more natural gas, and was perfectly fine with having my thermostat a bit higher because it was going to cost me more.

Regulation and politics have killed innovation, once again. Fuck that.

[tschwimmer]

I have a differing opinion, which is that paying market rates for electricity is not an innovation. It's a differing business model, and it's arguably a regression in terms of convenience and usability.

As a consumer who doesn't work in the power industry, I don't really want to follow the power costs. When I feel cold, I want to turn the heat on. When the dishwasher is full, I want to run it. Having to do an additional mental check every time I want to use electricity sounds annoying and stressful for me.

Is a market based solution better for slowing down climate change? Absolutely. Is that more importance than convince? Yes. However it's not an innovation. It's the consequence of humanity realizing that a relatively common and easy to use source of energy is killing us and we suddenly can't use it.

I don't see floating market rate energy being a meaningful part of the answer to climate change. For every person like you who likes the direct feedback mechanism of market pricing, there will be 10 people who vote against it as a price increase and 100 who just won't care. More and more, it looks like the solution to climate change will be a combination of: cheaper renewables, better battery storage, some carbon intensive power generation to bridge the gap while we get to the previous two, and (in the far far future) fusion energy. Asking consumers to change their habits or reduce their energy consumption is a nonstarter.

[fredophile]

If I had a gas station that offered gas for a fixed price, that was higher than the average gas price in your area, would you agree to use it exclusively? I don't see how the mental load for griddy is fundamentally different from buying gas at a gas station. When I notice prices are low I make the extra effort to top up my tank even if it means a small inconvenience. Do I drive less if gas prices are higher? No but other people might choose to.

[dragonwriter]

> If I had a gas station that offered gas for a fixed price, that was higher than the average gas price in your area, would you agree to use it exclusively? I don’t see how the mental load for griddy is fundamentally different from buying gas at a gas station.

Gas purchases are discrete events that, with extremely minimal planning are capable of being purchased from different outlets each time and, usually, time shifted to deal with per-provider or very short term spikes.

Electricity puchases are continuous and the ability to shift sources or time shift is often significantly less without much more significant planning.

Paying a premium for insurance against extreme variation makes some sense in either case, but a lot more in the latter case.

[thayne]

First of all, the typical person does not fill a car with gas nearly as often as you use electricity. Secondly, if I had to choose to use one of those gas stations exclusively, I might choose the one with a fixed rate, because:

1. It would make it easier to predict how much I would need to pay for gas each month, and simplify budgeting.

2. I don't need to worry about keeping track of the current price of gas

3. Depending on how my driving schedule matches the variance in prices, it may actually be cheaper for me.

[Teever]

Does anywhere else in the world sell electricity like this?

[OJFord]

In the UK 'variable rate' tariffs are common, usually updated monthly.

Octopus' is daily, and also offers an hourly plan 'Agile' with an API.

There is a regulatory cap on the cost of energy, which is a bit convoluted, but Octopus passes it on as a 35p/kWh cap on variable rate plans.

[thayne]

A price that changed monthly might be manageable, but daily or is probably too much for most consumers to keep up with.

[eisa01]

Yes, in Norway the consumer association even recommends it

[ahdinosaur]

local to me is Flick Electric in New Zealand: https://www.flickelectric.co.nz/freestyle

[anotherQuarter]

Couldn’t have said it better. This was the same experience I had. Unfortunately a lot of the bad press came from examples of people who signed up and agreed to Griddy’s terms (which were super straightforward) and then acted as if they were on a fixed rate plan.

Griddy was a tiny portion of the market and the focus on them only benefits those who couldn’t keep the grid reliable and profited immensely.

[anotherQuarter]

can’t edit my post but to clarify: I’m NOT convinced raising prices to $9k/kwh improved the outcome of this disaster

[AniseAbyss]

Well to be fair its not Griddy's fault US infrastructure is a joke. Variable rates work fine when you live in a country where the electrical grid isn't neglected.

[ocschwar]

> I have a pretty dark outlook when it comes to global warming, but when you're a griddy customer and you're watching your meter constantly, it just made sense.

Yes. However...

During the deep freeze, the consumer utilities were bidding up the price of juice with money they did not actually have. Ordinary consumers should not be competing for electricity with buyers who are able to buy on margin.

Now we know that this can happen. Now we have to plan an alternative.

[quickthrower2]

Wait until r/wsb find a way to bet on this!

[ocschwar]

Thankfully, you cannot participate in a real time electricity market if you don't have millions of dollars of copper, steel and aluminum installed to generate or use it.

[fallingknife]

Enron beat them to the game by like 20 years on this!

[quickthrower2]

But the power to mindlessly gamble must be democratised!

[ocschwar]

That's not actually what happened here. ERCOT was letting bids come in at crazy prices because at that point the only thing they were paying attention to was whether the Texas grid would collapse entirely. Volts and watts mattered. Dollars? A shared illusion anyway.

Now, not only did Griddy put its users at risk of high bills with these prices, the utilities bankrupted themselves putting these bids in too. The wind farm operators could only laugh while they were getting these crazy bids for every watt from a turbine that wasn't iced up, because they knew they were getting paid with imaginary money, and they were operating the windmills because what the hell else could you do?

The nat gas operators, well, they needed real money because they needed to buy gas at crazy prices, and the nat gas drillers needed money to get crews out to thaw out their infrastructure, which is extra important because we're talking about working outdoors in dangerous weather, and the crews are Texans that had not seen weather like this before.

So TLDR, none of this makes any sense, and it will be settled in bankruptcy court.

[tedunangst]

A company getting blown up by counter party risk doesn't sound like regulation. That's the free market at work.

[nickysielicki]

It's not exactly the free market when ERCOT fixes the price.

https://www.griddy.com/post/griddy-update-why-energy-prices-...

See the big image midway through the article.

[tedunangst]

What would the spot price have been in a no regulation, no price cap, no blackout market?

[dralley]

It literally doesn't matter if custumers can't afford to pay the fixed price, much less the "true" price. And they can't.

[nickysielicki]

> much less the "true" price.

?

I'm not trying to claim that prices didn't naturally rise by a lot, but in that particular situation (linked above), it's very clear that a lot of customers were paying $9/kWh when they could have paid $0.03/kWh. The latter is obviously easier to afford.

This event sucked for griddy customers, no doubt. But for the state of Texas and ERCOT to lock the price 300x higher than it would otherwise be is ridiculous.

[currymj]

the griddy model is that everyone should take a sort of second job as an electricity trader, but not make any money doing it.

it wouldn’t be a problem if it were just a matter of paying a little more or less, that would be great.

but there are catastrophic tail risks. so you have to constantly be watching because if your vigilance slips for even a few hours at a crucial time it could financially ruin you. traders at least get paid to do this and can de-risk when they need to.

[great_tankard]

The only reasonable thing you said was that people generally aren't acutely aware of their energy usage. That has more to do with our society's attitude towards how we build things and how we get around than anything else. To condemn people to have to devote all their waking hours to monitoring their meters is an absurd solution to that problem.

Lack of regulation and poor politics have killed people, once again. Griddy was a stupid solution to the wrong problem.

[Nemo_bis]

I'm sorry, but calm down. This is not the end of [dynamic pricing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_pricing#Time-based_uti...). It's just the end of one specific company's model of assuming it could just make its customers shoulder unlimited financial losses.

See some examples which actually work in Norway, Finland and Estonia (connected to the [Nord Pool](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Pool)). http://www.eemg-mediators.eu/downloads/dynamic_pricing_in_el...

[gizmo686]

What regulation are you referring to.

[nickysielicki]

> Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) cited its “complete authority over ERCOT” to direct that ERCOT set pricing at $9/kWh until the grid could manage the outage situation after being ravaged by the freezing winter storm.

from: https://www.griddy.com/post/griddy-update-why-energy-prices-...

Prices should have fallen and did not.

[salawat]

The grid was under maximum demand. Heck, I was refreshing realtime statistics.

That was not an unrealistic policy decision. The unrealistic policy decision was leaving it stuck there even after things started to thaw and restore.

The market, as they say, she remains irrational far longer than you stay solvent.

[zackees]

I just want to point out that Global Warming as an existential threat is more of a political position and less of a scientific one.

If the scientific method were applied to real planetary destruction we would rank the use of farmland as #1. If you doubt this, use Google earth and zoom in and notice the absolute scale of destruction farmland has done to the planet.

The planet has been 15 degrees hotter than it is today 150 million years ago. The fossil records show that this was an abundant time for the planet. Extinctions (including the most recent one) happen during ice ages. A hotter planet with more CO2 load would increase the greening of the planet.

Additionally, there is 33x H2O in the atmosphere than CO2. Look at the total spectrum absorption of H2O vs CO2 and you’ll find H2O is a more potent green house gas, having nearly the same dipole moment. If the run away green effect was possible with CO2, it would have already happened with H2O, but this has never occurred in geological timeframe, ever.

Additionally, all CO2 increases can already be mitigated via several technology stacks. One is the use of nuclear, which despite some accidents has the lowest death rate per terrawatt hour by an order of magnitude. Despite this astounding safety, the media has pushed to eliminate nuclear power even going so far as BANNING it under the green new deal.

Additionally, it was discovered by oceanographers in the 1980’s that surprisingly, phytoplankton, the largest natural sequestered of CO2 on the planet was bottle necked by... drum roll please... iron in the ocean!

Phytoplankton feeds zooplankton feeds fish. This is why there are record fish catches four years after a volcano eruption.

And when this was discovered by oceanographer John Mayer, who proclaimed “give me half a tanker of Iron and I will produce a new ice age”, the UN finally addressed this claim by systematically banning ALL study of any size of iron ocean fertilization in 2008, despite the immense protests of oceanographers around the world.

This embargo was violated in 2012 by rogue scientists off the coast of Vancouver BC who dropped a large quantity of iron off the coasts to prove that the iron would sequester this CO2, as well as Chili bucking the UN and going forward with its own studies on ocean fertilization.

And I’m not even going to touch on all the verified scandals in the IPCC other than to say that if CO2 was responsible for the warming then the international community could lay the whole issue to rest immediately by an experiment whereby liquifying the air into an 11 meter vertical column and throwing a heat lamp at the top and showing that tube A heated up X% more than tube B. But despite such an obvious and dead simple experiment that would forever win the global warming argument forever, has astoundingly, never been performed.

Infact if any millionaire is reading this and wants to settle this once for all, I offer to do the experiment, at cost, just to prove the world whether going from 300 parts per BILLION to 400 parts per BILLION actually makes that much of a difference, if any, to the two tubes.

To put that in perspective, if 11 meters of liquified air in a vertical tube represents the amount of air between your head and space, then the amount of CO2 floating on that 11 meters would measure 3mm, increasing to 4mm (+1mm from the industrialized era), while the amount of H2O would be a full 10 centimeters, give or take.

Once the scale of the difference of CO2, as a trace gas measured in PARTS PER BILLION is fully accepted onto the mind, the true absurdity of the failure to prove the CO2 super magic awesome heat trapping properties becomes so apparently rediculus that one can only go to the science papers to find this magic property. For surely, if CO2 was this great at trapping heat then it should be abundantly clear by SOME physical property that it is leaps and bounds above any other trace has that this is the case.

Yet when one looks into the “science” of human caused global warming, one gets bricked walled by a complexity argument driven by computer models with secret algorithms from the IPCC, who’s board members will benefit from the carbon credit tax, which would completely unravel with (1) the large scale adoption of nuclear or (2) the dusting of the oceans with iron composites.

Anyone can verify this narrative. I am not some an intel agent or compensated for this post in any way. Just an engineer that has spent WAY too many years going down every single rabbit hole that could have solved this problem but instead slowly realized that we as a human species have been guided down this fake environmental problem while the REAL environmental problem - farming, has all the air sucked out of it.

This post, despite being verifiable, will likely be deleted. For those that see this post before this happens, please do your due diligence and fact check this narrative. Do your own math.

Thank you for your consideration.

[stonogo]

This post is a little insane, but I think the most important delusion to address is the iron claims. For one, in the interest of making this searchable, I'll point out that the oceanographer quoted was in fact John Martin. For the rest, you can look up EIFEX, and then read the May 30, 2008 Convention on Biological Diversity summary, which placed a moratorium on commercial iron-seeding efforts, leaving research on the matter completely unaffected. The concern was that companies were being founded to sell carbon credits based on this possible sequestration mechanism, and it isn't clear what effect this would actually have on ocean biodiversity. Reputable and recent papers in this vein can be found here: https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2019.00022 and https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-15-5847-2018

The rest of the post is better off speaking alone.

[Nemo_bis]

Fascinating read:

> A key question concerns the amount of iron dust that would be required to induce draw down of CO2 from the atmosphere. [...] In total, this estimate concludes that ~2.8 million tons of biogenic iron oxides would be delivered over 100 days per year to the iron-limited regions of the global ocean to reach conditions where iron was not limiting primary productivity.

Many other sources are available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization#References and friends, please add this one too!

[sarabob]

Parts per million, not parts per billion. [1]

Yes, H2O is the strongest greenhouse gas, but its concentration (~5000ppm average) is limited by temperature and it will condense out as mist/clouds/rain. CO2 is nowhere near saturation levels, so atmospheric levels of CO2 have been growing. [2]

By all means you can tell the world that we should go back to a planet that looks like it did 15M years ago (miocene), but a 40m sea level increase is a pretty hard sell and IMHO does not match the "this is fine" tone of your post.

CO2 tends not to liquify but forms solid dry ice, so CO2 is not present in "liquid air" [3] (nor is anything with a boiling point <80K). Your proposed "obvious and dead simple" experiment is flawed.

"an engineer that has spent WAY too many years going down every single rabbit hole" is hard to justify based on the easily-debunked assertions you make, but even if you are correct and farming is the biggest cause and that it can/should bear the brunt of reduction efforts, it does not follow that we should therefore ignore all other avenues to address the problem. Yes, iron may be a part of the solution, but can you not see that building wind turbines, insulating houses and having electric cars is less risky than dumping huge quantities of iron in the sea?

Please consider that there _is no conspiracy_ and that scientists are mostly underpaid humans with a deep interest in their areas of study. Also consider that we know that fossil fuel companies have been funding AGW-denial. If you want conspiracies, try looking there.

[1]https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/... [2]https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/climatescience/climatesci... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_air

[imtringued]

I always wonder how people can fight tooth and nail for something small and local like their neighborhood to never change and then once there is a global phenomenon that is directly threatening the culture of every human on the planet they don't give a damn.

How is your neighborhood supposed to stay the same if the planet is getting hotter over time? It might only be 1°C right now but since nobody really cares we are likely to head to something less reasonable like 4°C and that will definitively impact culture.

[brianwawok]

To a 50-60 year old person with 10-30 years to live? I doubt global warming will have a major impact on their life. The cost of what is needed to change anything WILL be visible on their very next paycheck.

Now compare this with voter turnout by age bracket, and the current path of the world is pretty easy to see as people looking out for their own best interest, which is rational and what we are hardwired to do.

[zackees]

Thanks for the correction on PPM not PPB.

Let me address the H20 issue with the runaway global warming theory.

There is literally an ocean of H20, therefore the total load of H2O is elastic (unlike CO2). Hotter temperature -> more H2O in the atmosphere -> hotter temperature -> repeat.

Yet this hasn’t happened. The point about water condensing is besides the point, because water is also vaporizing and the equilibrium point is determined by temperature, which the runaway theory says is a divergent phenomenon.

Let’s rewrite the original assertion:

Higher Temperature -> Higher water vapor equilibrium —> higher temperature. This cycle can repeat endlessly because of the ocean.

As far as independent scientist doing global warming research on their own dime, this just isn’t true. There is public and private money set aside to study this.

Highly credentialed global warming skeptics like Judith Curry have generated around ~150 papers which conclude that global alarmism over human caused global warming is a “hoax”. Her actual words.

Astoundingly, there is a complete media blackout on this scientist and others like her. Infact a huge case the msm won’t cover anymore is the case of Tim Ball who decried global warming alarmism as pseudo science (Corruption of Climate Science Has Created 30 Lost Years," Jan 10, 2011).

He was sued for defamation by Michael Mann, the same person who was caught up in email scandal or manipulating climate data.

Tim Ball went to court and got discovery of Michael Mann’s climate date. 10 years later, the judge finally dismissed the case because Michael Mann failed to produce the data by the judges orders.

This is not “science” this is a religion run by a corrupt cartel.

[YarickR2]

Man, I appreciate you explaining all this in such a plain and emotional terms; you have one green energy convert right now.

[aaomidi]

This is ridiculous. It was killed because it removed stability from a market that shouldn't be unstable in this day and age.

Household electricity use isn't something to be this concerned about i.r.t global warming that you create thousands of dollars of debts for Americans because they didn't watch a ticker for their electricity usage.

It's pretty privileged to be sad that a company that created millions of dollars of debt is going to be shut down.