From the Dallas News, the rest of the story ...
www.dallasnews.com/business/2021/02/20/griddy-customers-face-5000-bills-for-5-freezing-days-in-texas/[Selected paragraphs]
The Texas power supplier Griddy, which sells unusual plans with prices tied to the spot price of power on the Texas grid, warned its customers over the weekend that their bills would rise significantly during the storm and that they should switch providers. Some quickly looked into doing that but found the actual changeover of service wouldn’t happen for days.
Those spot prices hit $9,000 per megawatt-hour. That means $9 for a kilowatt-hour that usually costs Cosby [customer you will meet below] around 7 cents, and sometimes as little as 2 cents. In Texas’ deregulated electricity market, Griddy and some other power suppliers charge customers wholesale variable rates per kilowatt-hour. The plans are relatively new. Most Texans pay fixed rates.
Now customers say they never dreamed they’d be billed in the four figures for five days of service.
Karen Cosby said her cost is $5,000 for usage since Saturday at her 2,700-square-foot house in Rockwall.
DeAndre Upshaw of Dallas said the electric bill for his 900-square-foot, two-story townhouse was also $5,000.
Other customers on social media expressed frustration with similar bills from Griddy, the power supplier that told its 29,000 customers on Saturday, after spot electricity prices soared, to quickly shift out of its network and find a new supplier.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, set a cap of $9,000 per megawatt-hour as an incentive to electricity suppliers to add natural gas-fired generating capacity, said Jere Thompson, retired co-founder of Dallas-based Ambit Energy.
“We all believed it [hitting that cap] would happen in the summer with peak cooling demand, but the possibility was always sitting out there,” Thompson said. Prices might hit the cap for a few hours, but no one thought they would stay at the cap for this long.
The price per megawatt-hour reached $9,000 around 10 p.m. Sunday night and stayed there for much of Monday and all of Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Friday morning, it fell to $35 and kept dropping. At 4 p.m., it was 85 cents.
Wholesale rate-based plans “can be tantalizing to consumers when the sales emphasis is placed on the possibility of very low rates during times of pleasant weather,” he said. “But they can be financially devastating when harsh hot or cold weather creates scarcity in the wholesale energy market.”
As a rule, the PUC encourages fixed-rate plans, he said. Those plans “may not offer the super-low pleasant-weather prices that are so attractive with those other plans,” he said, “but they moderate risk throughout all seasons.”
The wholesale-rate-related plans are available within the Texas retail market because that market is based on consumer choice, he said.
[customer story]
While searching for a new provider, Cosby [customer you met above] flipped the breakers connected to her heating units and moved into a small bedroom with an air mattress and her two dogs, Onie and Birkin, and shut off the rest of the house. Her energy use was limited to a space heater, making a cup of coffee in the morning and using the microwave for four or five minutes to heat her meals.
“It’s been 43 degrees in the house since Monday, and I still have a $5,000 bill,” she said.
Cosby tried to find a new provider, but the companies all said it would be several days before a switch could happen. Besides, she said, normally she likes the service. Her husband, who died in August, picked the plan over a year ago.
Griddy’s customers can monitor their electricity use daily and adjust their thermostats or cut back on appliance use to control their monthly costs.
Cosby said her average monthly bill had been $125 to $150, sometimes under $100. She thought: What could it be, 10 times higher? She knew she could afford that for a short period and finally decided to stay.
She guessed wrong.
She emailed Griddy, asking the company to work with her. “I didn’t want to play the widow card,” she said, “but I did because my financial situation has changed dramatically.”
Cosby was not able to reach the company by phone but got an emailed reply saying Griddy had a plan that would allow her to pay the bill over five months.
