[GlickWick]

That's painful, feel bad for folks having to deal with that. This is why regulated utilities are important.

A bit concerned about this website though. Appears to be a despair-themed blog focused on convincing people we're doomed instead of talking about how to make things better. Feels a bit like a disenfranchisement campaign at worst, and obnoxious clickbait at best.

[jlmorton]

This is the wholesale price of electricity. The distributors plan for price surges like this, and the retail price stays the same.

Although, the Texas electricity market is deeply weird, and people can actually pick an electricity provider, and some let people pay a price based on the wholesale rate, but not many people do that.

[DannyBee]

You can't have consumer plans that bill at wholesale rates anymore in texas.

After the last time consumers were caught out, they banned it in HB16 in 2021: https://legiscan.com/TX/bill/HB16/2021

[rayiner]

Texas utilities are regulated, in fairly similar ways to how the German electric market is regulated. Shortages can drive spot prices for electricity extremely high for short periods of time (over 700 euros per megawatt hour last august in Germany).

[vel0city]

> feel bad for folks having to deal with that.

Nobody is directly. People are almost always on fixed rate contracts. Those have been mostly trending down over the last year and are cheaper today than a few years ago in real dollars.

[kortilla]

Regulated utilities cannot magic more generation into existence. Shortfalls are paid for with or without regulated utilities.

[fulafel]

Regulation can ensure there's less risk of abrupt shortfalls and price spikes (eg mandating headroom for peak production, or usage rationing). Record heat waves aren't exceptional now.

[GlickWick]

Sure, but they're generally covered and not exposed to the consumer, at least not in the form of major spikes.

[vel0city]

Consumers weren't exposed here. Nobody got their bills massively spiked from this.

[DannyBee]

Not anymore. Until 2021, consumers could choose providers who bill them at the wholesale rate, as weird as that is.

As a result, the last time this happened, consumers were exposed: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/us/texas-storm-electric-b...

Those plans are now banned, i believe.

[vel0city]

Some customers. Very, very, very, very few.

Griddy had at its peak like 29,000 customers. There are >9M households in Texas. 29,000 / 9,000,000 = 0.0032. So like 0.3% of households in Texas were Griddy customers, by far the biggest provider of these spot market based plans.

Its insane to me how blown out of proportion those stories were received by people outside of Texas. An extreme minority of people directly faced those kinds of massive bills. The real story was more like how were the co-ops and municipal power companies going to handle the bills they faced, which actually does impact a number of consumers down the line, but everyone focuses on a tiny handful of people that got $20k bills because they gambled on the market.

But hey, as evidenced here tons of people outside of Texas really think that's how electricity works in Texas. People in this thread, that some massive chunk of households actually pay spot market rates. Which now its really pretty much 0%, as for regular household plans that style is illegal, so you'd have to do some weird tricks with the power company to get on some kind of spot plan in your home.

[Aloha]

I dont think anyone but bulk power purchasers will notice, tbh

[thephyber]

The unique feature of the Texas deregulated grid is that lots of end user products expose consumers to dynamic pricing. There will be lots of households that are exposed to these extreme price swings.

[DannyBee]

They banned consumer plans that bill at wholesale rates in 2021 after the last time spikes caused massive power bills.

https://legiscan.com/TX/bill/HB16/2021

[thephyber]

Interesting. I didn’t know about this update.

[vel0city]

It's near impossible to sign up for a dynamic pricing like Griddy anymore. Practically nobody is on it. Even back in the Griddy heyday it was like ~5%~ 0.3% of consumers on those kinds of plans.