His Lights Stayed on During Texas’ Storm. Now He Owes $16,752 | Hacker News Reader

His Lights Stayed on During Texas’ Storm. Now He Owes $16,752

nytimes.com

26 pointsmistersquid18 comments

The people who are getting these huge bills are the same people who have been benefitting for years from the cheap wholesale prices.

So basically, they have been living with no insurance, and now that they have hit some serious price volatility, they can't afford it.

I'm not sure the best solution for this, but I don't think it should be for the state to just step in and absolve everyone involved.

Obviously, the practice of wholesale billing has to be regulated more strictly. I get the free market intention behind it. Users will be more likely to limit their usage when prices increase. But the problem is that in cases like these winter storms, electricity can mean life or death.

You can't have a truly free market unless we are willing to let people die if they don't have the money.

It's the same reason totally free markets break down with healthcare. If someone chooses not to buy insurance, we are not the kind of country that will turn them away at the hospital and let them die. And if you aren't willing to do that, then that is not a free market.

It's not nor has it ever been a free market. The free market mythology which is invoked whenever it's a powerless party or the public involved in order to justify them paying for acts of nature which invalidate contracts in contract law is not a sound policy. When someone signs up for wholesale rates they are not disclosed the downside properly and if they were there is no way it would stand up in court, and it's simple enough for the wholesaler to get insurance on this which again would fail in case of which extreme unforeseen events. If we can bail out banks, corporations, and billionaires, we can bail out individuals due to extreme unforseen events of natures, contract law allows for this, for the contract to be null and void due to unforseen acts of nature.

Am I alone in thinking the government reaction to this shows the complete ideological bankruptcy of supposed "free market" Republicans? When push comes to shove, they support government intervention as much as any bleeding heart liberal. The only differences are who they want to protect, where their political bread is buttered. What is different between an energy bill and a bill from a hospital?

At some point it's almost like we ought to treat Republican governments like a foreign adversary - just like putting sanctions on Russia is not ideal because ordinary non murdering Russians get hurt, it's not as if we can condemn regular Texans to freeze because of lowlives like Abbott and Cruz. But we have to do something about it, at some point the amount of damage they are doing to the republic has to be confronted.

Sanctioning political opponents kind of sounds like a dictatorship to me.

Quite frankly I do not think people like Majorie Greene or Steve King being stripped of committee assignments sounds at all like a dictatorship. If anything I think that sentiment is really insulting to opposition leaders in actual dictatorships, who are thrown in jail if not executed. I think the casualness in which that word is bandied about speaks volumes about how people in the West take their free democracies for granted and lack understanding of how most of the rest of the world operates.

I'm seriously disappointed in HN when the only responses to consumers getting $16K power bills are them getting blamed or instructed on how to live without electricity.

Consumers or amateur market speculators?

How do you deal with a child that only wants rewards with no responsibility?

Now pretend that child belongs to another set of parents that live far away, and the parents happen to have the same mindset as the child.

What do you do?

What would be your preferred reaction? That we all agree Texas taxpayers should foot the bill for their money pinching peers?

If you take on risk your should fully assume that risk. The same way that if your insure your house for half its price to save on monthly payments you don't go around expecting the government to bail you out.

I’d like to have a sideways arrow, for ‘get this garbage out’ so that there is a difference between voting ‘I don’t like this’ and I want this comment killed. HN is my favourite place to come and read opinions, because while I don’t agree with every opinion, They are better expressed here than on most forums, more likely to be sincere and rarely pure trolling. Unless I’m not picking up on something, there are comments here getting killed for being unpopular, it would be better if that only happened for crappy behaviour. I think the dead comments are often some of my favourite to read. On my laptop I can change the css to read the dead, but on phone my I’m squinting at the grey on grey.

I agree with you, but dang has pointed out several times that pg is fine with downvotes signifying disagreement[1]. So it's unlikely to change any time soon.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

hello llimos, thanks for that

Such unregulated ridiculous systems remain only in second and third world countries. The US being in the former category.

Any stories of people who made this kind of money from exporting power to the grid from a home solar and battery system?

DIY Rocket Stove

https://youtu.be/KAi0mE5sT5w

$10 Tent heater

https://youtu.be/3YB7A_C_ZUo

Rocket Stove with Computer Fan

https://youtu.be/uKEirCY7EoE

and so on...

He'll know better next time.

Does he have an option to pay a safer, fixed rate? Are you 100 percent sure that is available?

It’s a shame because of bad actors (naive consumers) the rest of consumers will be punished by likely legislation prohibiting things like griddy

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