[toast0]

My understanding is Griddy needs to pay within a small number of days of Griddy customers receiving the power.

But it looks like Griddy had set up customer billing on a prepaid system. You had to deposit $49 to start, and they'd debit your usage as you went. If your balance was low, they'd charge your credit card on file. I would bet at least some customers' hit their credit card limits and their Griddy accounts have a negative balance.

Even for those customers they successfully charged, they may not be able to access that money right away. Some of their customers are likely to dispute the charges, and others will take a long time to settle their negative balances. Griddy would need to have a lot of reserves to pay their current bills while waiting for their customers to pay, and they clearly don't have them; also, it seems like they were unable to get extra capital at the drop of a hat, like Robinhood was when they needed it recently.

[abathur]

AFAIK Griddy also made a point of not cutting anyone off for non-payment during the catastrophe, further exacerbating how large some of these bills could get.

[toast0]

From looking at their documents [1], that's part of the standard Public Utility Commission of Texas standard terms: "Your REP may not order the disconnection of your service for any of the following reasons: for non-payment during an extreme weather emergency"

So, it wasn't really Griddy's choice during the emergency. After the emergency, there's not much of a point to cut people off, as the normal usage is peanuts compared to what was incurred during the emergency.

[1] https://assets-global.website-files.com/5df01ca286f5a984f50c...