There are now reports of Texans having electric bills in the thousands of dollars. One person was over $10,000.
Somehow, their electric companies are like a dime a dozen and can surge charge based on demand.
One lady has a rental house that is empty with the heat at 60 degrees so things didn’t freeze. So her power bill was like $5,000.
Poop is insane.
Yeah, we have companies like Griddy that change their prices based on 'Market Demand' for power. So in a situation like this, the demand for power is treated like a stock. Since everyone was using their heat to keep their house from being freezing and to try and save their pipes from bursting, the drain was alot higher than normal.
And so the 'stock' shot up.
Last I checked, at normal rates, a megawatt hour was like 50 bucks with Griddy. Not that bad, right? A Megawatt powers about 500 households for a whole year.
But let's say like this week-- it shoots up to
$9,000.
Now we have a problem. if someone had their heat at like some baseline temperature this week, that's about 18 dollars an hour for Griddy to break-even if everyone in a certain area had their power running. To turn a profit, they have to hike it a little more -- so lets say it's about $22. That goes up or down depending on how hot you had it, and how many units your house has. Griddy charges in real time, so the $5,000 now becomes scarily plausible. It's bad enough to where people are being asked to leave Griddy to save themselves.
So right now, if you had this stuff on with Griddy all week with no stops -- and lets say one unit, you're looking at a ballpark of $2,640 on top of whatever last week was.
...And so, servicing electricity like a stock becomes next to predatory during an emergency.
