But there are not 5 fixed rate plans in Bryan. You can pay BTU your monthly bill or not but it's one fixed rate. There aren't any options for providers. Period.

Faustus said:

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HTownAg98 said:

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You should also kick her in the ***** for not switching prior to this. Most variable rate providers were telling their customers to leave so they wouldn't get hit with that kind of bill.

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Yeah, it's not like Griddy was going to bank on the spike.
It's hard to fathom how it happened, but she claims she did not know it was a variable rate plan.

Fortunately I'm not the kind to dwell on it or go ballistic. It's a card that I will keep in my pocket next time she wants to blow up at me about something though. An expensive get out of jail free card if you will.

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Dude, I'm single, never married and even I know that's not how that works.

You do NOT have a get out jail free card. You have a card now that says any time you bring this up you're going straight to jail for bringing it up and with every mention it becomes more your your fault.

Kenneth_2003 said:

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Be interesting to see how some of the rural co-ops handle this, seeing that they're member owned and the consumers are the co-op members.

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This is what mine has to say:

Quote:

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FEBRUARY BILL - WHAT TO EXPECT

At this time, XX Electrical Cooperative (EC) does not have all the information related to the costs associated with the extreme weather event of last week as discussions are being held at the state level on how to best assist customers. We recognize that EC members are concerned about receiving high electric bills. The power cost recovery factor (PCRF), which is the component of your rate to recover fluctuations in the wholesale power cost, will remain the same for February. Some members will see an increase in their electric bill associated with increased consumption, but the rate per kilowatt hour will remain unchanged.

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I'm on variable rate plan, but I don't my bill has gone up like being reported on the media. I haven't been billed yet but when I login it says my cost of energy last week was almost the same as what a full months bill would be. I'm expecting my February bill to be double the average.

Starting to see cheaper fixed rate plans pop up on powertochoose but I hate those Bill credits after reaching 1000 because I never do except in the summer.

That's what space heaters in an empty room are for.

You can think whatever you want but it's craptastic customer service. Power markets and pricing are complex and completely outside the intellectual expertise of most people, so a bit of instruction from the company supplying the service isn't excessive. ****, even a pack of cigarettes warns me I might be killing myself.

Again, this seems to be your professional area, so it all makes sense to you. But for many people it's an "I don't even know what I don't know" situation.

Faustus said:

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Wife handles the utilities/bills/groceries. She's self-employed and works from home a couple of days a week, and the rest of the time runs the household.

I never in a million years thought she'd sign up for a variable rate plan anymore than we'd sign on for an adjustable rate mortgage.

I was wrong and she had us on Griddy. $3.3k for the electric bill.
We're no longer on Griddy and she no longer has autonomy in that area of our finances.

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You also get to hold it over her for posterity.
"Remember that time when you picked the variable rate...."

Co-ops are not (or should not be) purchasing any significant amount of power in the spot market. If there were a short term spike in demand above what they have locked in with power purchase agreements or have hedged, then maybe there is a small amount of their total load that they have to purchase at spot prices. It should be negligible. If a co-op got caught substantially short power, I wouldn't be surprised if they could securitize the cost and spread it out over several years like they would if a hurricane damaged a lot of their infrastructure.

The only people purchasing a substantial amount of power at spot prices are REPs like Griddy (and, as a result, their customers) and poorly run REPs who will all go out of business whenever PUCT makes them pay for the power they had to purchase at spot prices for their customers.

Similarly, my understanding is that the fuel riders city owned and regulated utilities have are not based on the spot price of natural gas. The fuel riders are intended to function as a pass-through mechanism for the utility's actual cost of fuel, and the utilities are not purchasing a meaningful amount of natural gas at spot prices. Even if they did, I don't think it is a monthly variable mechanism...probably set based on annual projections with a true-up or something like that. By the way, most natural gas companies wok their same way. Your bill has a line item for the cost of the actual natural gas.

Variable rate is different from the indexed / spot market rate plans like Griddy that have a different rate every 15 minutes. Your rate can probably change monthly, but not within a month.

If you're on a fixed rate plan through your muni/coop, then your bill today will be affected by the amount you used (or did not) last week, but your Kw/h rate will not be changed.....YET.

There are muni/coops out there who had to buy power at $9k for the volumes above what they expected to sell to their customers last week, and they had to sell it to them at a (low) fixed price. You think they are just sitting on that much cash to absorb that? Better go check if your muni or coop has had to get an emergency loan yet to pay ERCOT.

Even worse...some "green" muni's and coops signed contracts with wind farms to provide portions of their energy. Guess what your coop had to do if that wind farm didn't deliver that power.....buy it for $9k.

As some have pointed out....as long as a coop or muni was self scheduling AND delivered their required amount they were not paying $9K to purchase power and selling it at their normal fixed rate, bleeding cash and having to figure out how to make it up in the future. BTU and College Station in 2011 after the rolling blackouts took very different approaches. BTU kept customers off longer and did not buy market power after the grid was stabilized and the price came down. They did this by keeping the interruptible customers off and continuing rolling blackouts for 2 more hours. College Station had no interruptible customers to keep off and went out and bought market power as soon as the rolling blackouts were over for several hours. The CS rates then had to be jacked up 25% over the next 2 years to pay for the several hours purchase of market based power that morning. So just because you were on a coop or muni doesn't mean they won't have price exposure from the spike....but it doesn't mean they didn't have any price exposure either. Depends on what each companies people decided to do, where their contracts were, if they had their own plants that stayed up or went down, etc.

I have a facility on a market rate tied to the ERCOT day ahead price but we have a control to open the main breaker and it is set to trip off if the day ahead price goes to more than $200/MWh. That facility has that type of flexibility. I have another facility on a market rate but bought an option so that if the price goes above $175/MWh I'm paying a capped price of $125/MWh. At that one I don't care if the ERCOT price was $9000. All my other facilities are on a rate tied to the futures market forward price curve so they are fixed...they just happen to change each month of the upcoming 18 months as the futures markets values change but I know what that price is each month already.

Those are things that work for me that may not work for you that "the market" gives me the opportunity to do because I educated myself.

NomadicAggie said:

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Even worse...some "green" muni's and coops signed contracts with wind farms to provide portions of their energy. Guess what your coop had to do if that wind farm didn't deliver that power.....buy it for $9k.

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Or just shut their customers off. I have friends who were victims of this.

You're basically saying you, or maybe the average person, is incapable of making a rational decision about an electric bill. I don't agree.

Pricing isn't complex. There's a electricity facts label. It tells you how much you pay per kWhr. You don't need to know how the grid works to read that. Whatever your rate for that month is times how many kWhr you use is what you pay.

If you can't figure that out, you also can't understand how rent, or a mortgage, or a car payment, or a cell phone subscription works. I really don't know what to tell you.

Again, ignorance is expensive. At some point people have to accept responsibility. No one signs a contract for you. If you don't understand what you're signing, don't sign. If you sign anyway, and it doesn't go well, that isn't "bad customer service."

LostInLA07 said:

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Co-ops are not (or should not be) purchasing any significant amount of power in the spot market. If there were a short term spike in demand above what they have locked in with power purchase agreements or have hedged, then maybe there is a small amount of their total load that they have to purchase at spot prices. It should be negligible. If a co-op got caught substantially short power, I wouldn't be surprised if they could securitize the cost and spread it out over several years like they would if a hurricane damaged a lot of their infrastructure.

The only people purchasing a substantial amount of power at spot prices are REPs like Griddy (and, as a result, their customers) and poorly run REPs who will all go out of business whenever PUCT makes them pay for the power they had to purchase at spot prices for their customers.

Similarly, my understanding is that the fuel riders city owned and regulated utilities have are not based on the spot price of natural gas. The fuel riders are intended to function as a pass-through mechanism for the utility's actual cost of fuel, and the utilities are not purchasing a meaningful amount of natural gas at spot prices. Even if they did, I don't think it is a monthly variable mechanism...probably set based on annual projections with a true-up or something like that. By the way, most natural gas companies wok their same way. Your bill has a line item for the cost of the actual natural gas.

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Good points. I recall one co-op, don't recall where, expressing frustration that they were generating power sufficient for their customers but were still being instructed by ERCOT to shed load. Now I realize that the purpose of their post was to placate their membership and make ERCOT the bad guy so their phones would quit ringing, but not the point.

With previous power purchase contracts in place on top of their load shedding they might not have been buying any power. Depending on how many customers they shut off they might actually have not used all of their planned power.

Paying for electricity on the spot market could make sense if done correctly.

Use the savings to buy a generator to run your house. When the electricity prices go high, shut off the electricity and use your generator. When they come back down, shut off the generator and turn the electricity back on.

Zobel said:

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Pricing isn't complex. There's a electricity facts label. It tells you how much you pay per kWhr. You don't need to know how the grid works to read that. Whatever your rate for that month is times how many kWhr you use is what you pay.

If you can't figure that out, you also can't understand how rent, or a mortgage, or a car payment, or a cell phone subscription works. I really don't know what to tell you.

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You can start by apologizing for your use of such a terrible analogy. Lots of people know approximately how much data a 30 minute Netflix episode uses and can budget out a data plan. Lots of people understand interest rates. But does the average person know how many kwhs an hour of the heater uses? Now what if the average temperature drops 10 degrees? Now what if the temperature drops and demand exceeds supply? What will that do to pricing? (Your post hoc analysis (use X rate) is obviously simple, but not overly useful for planning.) The answer is a resounding no.

These aren't simple or intuitive things to learn, so again, it's crummy customer service to provide zero explanations or help in choosing a plan, and to provide zero business intelligence as market conditions change and customers are faced with conditions they don't fully understand. I don't even know how you can argue this. Helping your customers to make good decisions for them is a cornerstone of building trust and long term business relationships. But this concept seems to be as foreign to you as power grids and generation are to me.

You obviously know a lot, but you seem incapable of determining what elements of the knowledge you possess are due to years of working in the field, and therefore are quite arcane to the general public.

REPs don't give a crap about their customers choosing the best plan. In fact, they want their customers to not think about the plan they are on so the REP can move them to an expensive one. REPs care so little about their customers (and there seems to be minimal barrier to entry in that market) that entire new businesses like Energy Ogre have been created to manage the hassle for people.

Zobel said:

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Again, ignorance is expensive. At some point people have to accept responsibility. No one signs a contract for you. If you don't understand what you're signing, don't sign. If you sign anyway, and it doesn't go well, that isn't "bad customer service."

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By the way, sweeping, condescending statements like this are moronically egotistical simply because this is your professional milieu. You depend on doctors, lawyers, construction workers, etc. everyday; heck, you even sign things you don't really understand with the first two because you lack the expertise to analyze their work and analysis. Don't act like a chud just because other people don't get your world at the level you do.

YouBet said:

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Faustus said:

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Wife handles the utilities/bills/groceries. She's self-employed and works from home a couple of days a week, and the rest of the time runs the household.

I never in a million years thought she'd sign up for a variable rate plan anymore than we'd sign on for an adjustable rate mortgage.

I was wrong and she had us on Griddy. $3.3k for the electric bill.
We're no longer on Griddy and she no longer has autonomy in that area of our finances.

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Holy crap. However, I've read you won't really have to pay that full amount, but is that true?

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We haven't paid it yet.
Governor is supposedly meeting this week to talk about relief, but no clue how it will shake out.

Obviously we're not going to skip on the bill and will pay the entire thing if that's how it transpires, but right now it's still up in the air how the state may step in.

https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/22/texas-pauses-electric-bills/

I don't know how many watts my AC uses, but I could figure it out...but I don't need to. I do know what I roughly use in each month, because I've bought power for more than a year. Every electric bill I've ever had gives the last few month's usage of electricity on it.

If you are on anything except something like Griddy what the grid does is irrelevant. You have a fixed rate for power you use, even if that rate changes from month to month.

You're mistaking the absence of even a casual amount of due diligence for something that is very difficult.

I thought Griddy auto-debited money in advance, and would just "reload" your account when your pre-paid balance got low. Did they stop doing that?

Kenneth_2003 said:

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Faustus said:

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HTownAg98 said:

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You should also kick her in the ***** for not switching prior to this. Most variable rate providers were telling their customers to leave so they wouldn't get hit with that kind of bill.

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Yeah, it's not like Griddy was going to bank on the spike.
It's hard to fathom how it happened, but she claims she did not know it was a variable rate plan.

Fortunately I'm not the kind to dwell on it or go ballistic. It's a card that I will keep in my pocket next time she wants to blow up at me about something though. An expensive get out of jail free card if you will.

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Dude, I'm single, never married and even I know that's not how that works.

You do NOT have a get out jail free card. You have a card now that says any time you bring this up you're going straight to jail for bringing it up and with every mention it becomes more your your fault.

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It depends on what I'm in trouble for.
If it's for picking up some wine she finds excessive it might work.

But you're probably right upon reflection.

This event has taken care of the "barriers to entry" problem....

Zobel said:

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I don't know how many watts my AC uses, but I could figure it out...but I don't need to. I do know what I roughly use in each month, because I've bought power for more than a year. Every electric bill I've ever had gives the last few month's usage of electricity on it.

If you are on anything except something like Griddy what the grid does is irrelevant. You have a fixed rate for power you use, even if that rate changes from month to month.

You're mistaking the absence of even a casual amount of due diligence for something that is very difficult.

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You're chasing your tail trying to explain this to him.

Just accept that you are right and move on. Some people want to learn and some just want to blame others when things go wrong.

It's not condescending, or at least is isn't supposed to be. If you don't understand something the opportunity to figure it out is before you sign up.

You're clearly a smart person. I am very confident that you can figure out how much your electric bill might be in a high use month. It wasn't that you couldn't, it is that you didn't. And now instead of saying "hm, I should maybe have spent a weekend figuring out my electric bill, but I never did" you're saying "my electric provider should have thought of this for me".

Ginormus Ag said:

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Faustus said:

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It's a card that I will keep in my pocket next time she wants to blow up at me about something though. An expensive get out of jail free card if you will.

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You think that card exists?

Here's some news for you. She already has a card that will trump that card. Not only will it trump that card, she will turn that get out of jail card on you somehow.

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Too funny.
The board figured had this figured out more quickly than I did.

Based on the consensus I'll not be playing any card I thought I had in the future.

LostInLA07 said:

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I thought Griddy auto-debited money in advance, and would just "reload" your account when your pre-paid balance got low. Did they stop doing that?

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I got the email from my wife at work yesterday about the $3.3k, along with the request that I do research about whether we had to pay it. So we have not paid it yet, and there's no way (I think) we'd have had over $3k in a Griddy account.

Since we switched carriers pronto there's no reloading going on.

96ags said:

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You're chasing your tail trying to explain this to him.

Just accept that you are right and move on. Some people want to learn and some just want to blame others when things go wrong.

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I'm wrong? I claimed that zero communications on rate movements, refusing to provide any info on blackout scheduling, and turning on my power for a meaningless hour in the middle of the night and then charging me $30 for it is ****ty customer service. Please, please tell me how that's wrong. I think it borders on axiomatic.

I also think forecasting usage and costs during record low temps is very difficult for the average Joe. All my data was on a 2 day lag, and I imagine a lot of other people were in the same boat.

Did your rate change??

Hopefully not. Maybe check whatever card or account they had on file.

From their website:

Add $49 to your account balance upon enrollment. This is your money that goes to your future electricity use.
Your account balance will then be debited daily based on your usage.
When your account balance reaches $25 (our balance minimum), you will be recharged the $49 to ensure continued, uninterrupted service.

LostInLA07 said:

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Hopefully not. Maybe check whatever card or account they had on file.

From their website:

Add $49 to your account balance upon enrollment. This is your money that goes to your future electricity use.
Your account balance will then be debited daily based on your usage.
When your account balance reaches $25 (our balance minimum), you will be recharged the $49 to ensure continued, uninterrupted service.

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Good advice.
Will report back on the morrow. There might have been more shenanigans from the wife similar to letting me know about the bill via email.

My brother lives in Flower Mound, and posted this on FB this AM....

Quote:

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, I'm on Griddy which sells you electric at wholesale prices The 5 days of Trump caused winter ( he stopped global warming) my power never went of But my electric bill for those days is $1666.00 there goes my stimulus check.

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Quote:

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It auto draws from my account at 49.00 each time and 2 of those days 10 times each day.

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Quote:

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I know, normal power companys average power use. I have months my bill will be 49.00 for the month

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He can be a bit of a drama queen, but I don't doubt these assertions, except maybe the global warming part!

Ok... The whole but it's ok cause normal months it's real cheap.
Morons, they were told super crazy high prices were coming, they were told to change providers. Naw, I'll just blow through several grand cause I normally don't spend as much.

People are dumber than I thought.