Posted on 02/22/2021 12:04:13 AM PST by knighthawk
Texas utility regulators will temporarily ban power companies from billing customers or disconnecting them for non-payment, after the deadly winter storm that caused widespread blackouts, Governor Greg Abbott said on Sunday.
Abbott called an emergency meeting with state lawmakers on Saturday after reports of many customers receiving bills for thousands of dollars for just a few days of electricity service while Texas was gripped by frigid temperatures.
'Texans who have suffered through days of freezing cold without power should not be subjected to skyrocketing energy bills,' Abbott told reporters on Sunday in San Antonio.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Many of the sleazy sales promotions usually do something like this:
Rates per KWHRS use month:
500: 11 cents
1000: 10 cents
2000: 9 cents
Average person looks at that and thinks, "Ok, I average 2000 or more and 9 cents is reasonable. All those July and August AC kw's will get the lowest rate." But the fine print states the 2000 rate is from 1001 to 2000 and once you go over 2000 you get billed for a much, much higher rate. Real sneaky and sleazy.
I am adamantly opposed to laws against “price gouging” because variable prices have an important role in adjusting demand during changing market conditions. But an important aspect of this is that works only in cases where the consumer knows the price BEFORE making a transaction. If the price of a hotel room goes from $100 to $500 during a period of high demand after a disaster, I can always refuse to pay by finding alternative arrangements for spending the night somewhere. It would be ludicrous for the hotel to raise the rate and charge me the $500 after I had already spent the night there.
There was an article posted here where certain waivers were denied.
Here the info behind that article:
https://twitter.com/amuse/status/1363522279141826560
That would require the electric company to call/email each customer on variable rate plans and say “Dear Customer, TODAY, your KW/HR rate will be X, much, much higher than normal. Do you want to pay that rate or should we cut the juice today?”
I have a text and data plan with my mobile phone carrier. I was using it heavily for work over a period of several months last year. Each month I got a message or two that said something like this: “You have 10% of your allotted data left with 5 days remaining in the billing cycle. You will be charged an extra $15 if you exceed your monthly limit.” That gave me the heads-up to either scale back on my phone use or pay more for what I was using.
Some states will allow you not to carry mandatory auto insurance if you can prove you have the financial wherewithal to assume and pay the risk. Either drop those plans or do something similar.
Seems like their power had to be on for them to run up those bills. So how did the company not hold up their end of the bargain? As long as those people had the ability to run up a bill, they had the ability to check the current rates and use less when it was expensive — exactly the purpose of the cheaper plan they signed up for.
So another version of your tale might be:
Imagine if you chose one insurance plan that cost more over the last five years based on a flat, consistent premium of $100/month.
Your neighbor chose a different plan with a variable premium and only paid an average of $25/month for the last five years (saving him $4500 over 5 years).
You and your neighbor both filed claims after an event. Your claim was denied while your neighbor’s claim was honored.
Your neighbor came crying to you that the insurance company was cheating him because it insisted on taking off $1,500 from his claim, for the deductible that was listed on his policy.
I’m sure the electricity was on when the $1,500 bill was being run up. But it wasn’t on all the time — and the unreliability of the power is the reason the $1,500 bill is not justified, in my humble opinion.
Not practical in this type of situation. You fall asleep with the power off. At 1 AM it cuts on. You wake up at 6 AM and check the prices. Whoops, horse is already out of the barn. Just got charged $10/kwhr for 5 hours while you were snuggled up in 5 blankets, snoozing away...
Then who is going to foot the bill? Texas has the electrical industry she wanted. You cannot expect to enjoy low electrical bills when energy is in good supply without having to pay more when electricity is not.
Sounds a bit strange...at least in California the “end user/homeowner” is on a CPUC regulated rate schedule and the “price per KWH” would not change w/o months and months of CPUC rate hearings. Even during the AB-1890/Enron/PG&E bankruptcy/Grey-out Davis” era prices changed very little for the end user. Don’t Texas utilities “hedge” and buy power thru “futures contracts”?
In Texas, you have a few regional distributors who provide the juice to the house and then like a hundred electric companies that you can contract with. The pricing is the distributor rate plus the electric company rate.
Griddy is pass through wholesale pricing. 99% of the time it is the cheapest plan. Customers know this. And now Abbott goes communist because of the 1%
Good information. So it looks like even if the contractual relationships can be complex and the customer has lots of options, there’s still a potential problem with excessive demand for gas when both direct use for heating and indirect demand for electricity from gas-powered generating stations are in play.
Dumb analogy. The Griddy customers only got big bills if they didn’t lose power.
I don’t think it’s the 1% that is the problem here. It’s the 1% situation tied to an operational fiasco where the power was out for millions of customers.
Not Griddy...that is what this conversation is about - Griddy passes through wholesale rates so that they don’t hedge
The distributor rates are fixed, they are just passing out the juice provided to them by the producers who throw it into the grid. Like a trucking company delivering tomatoes, a flat rate of $200 per tractor trailer from point A to B, for tomatoes that cost 50 cents a pound or $10 dollars per pound. Makes no difference to the trucking company and what they charge.
I’m assuming the power was not out for the full month even for those who DID lose power. Am I wrong?
That’s electric only.
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