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Comment by athollywood | Hacker News Reader

Texas electric prices have been capped at $9000/MWHr for the last few days. Average is about $35/MWhr. The Texas electric bill is about $10 billion per day right now.

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Yeah, a large fraction of the natural gas infrastructure froze and the governor prioritized gas for home heating over electrical generation.

So natural gas spot prices have gone from around $3-MMBTU to like $350-MMBTU and there is 30GW of electrical generating capacity offline.

Looks around 1k right now. http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/contours/rtmLmp.html

There must be lots of generators making bank.

When this winter storm set in, I switched from grid power to my natural gas generator. I have a 48kW Generac attached to a 1000 gallon natural gas tank. The tank also feeds all my gas appliances and fireplaces in my home. At the current rate of usage, I have another 24 days on which to operate.

Where most people are paying enormous rates, I purchased my whole tank of gas for $940, plus delivery fee.

I have strongly recommended to my friends to have generators installed and to buy their own natural gas storage tanks to power them. While my personal setup was about $20,000 fully installed and hooked up, you can easily get a 24kW model that would power most homes 2000-2500 sq. ft. easily, for about $7000-$9000.

Best part is, many whole home generator providers will allow you to finance if the upfront costs are too burdensome.

Careful what you look at. The relevant number here is the RTT-SPP level from your link (not RTM-LMP), which then shows $9000/MWh everywhere in Texas.

Wow, is there a source for that? That would be $1000 per person every three days, right?

(edit: found a Bloomberg article confirming it for Monday)

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