Griddy Is Shutting Down
griddy.com
griddy.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griddy
Griddy is an American power retailer that sells energy to people in the state of Texas at wholesale prices for a $10 monthly membership fee and has approximately 29,000 members. The company itself is based in California.
During the 2021 Texas power crisis, Griddy received attention for urging its customers to leave the company. Some Griddy customers signed up for wholesale variable rates plans allowed by the Texas deregulated electricity market, found themselves facing over $5,000 bills for five days of service during the storm.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas caps the wholesale price of electricity at $9,000 per megawatt-hour, which translates to $9 per kilowatt-hour. Customers had seen the wholesale rates hit that high previously in August 2019, but only for a 90 minute period, which the company then noted was an unprecedented long time at that price. During the February 2021 storm wholesale rates, and therefore Griddy's rates, were at the maximum for about four days. On February 15, during the power crisis, the state's Public Utility Commission required ERCOT to set the price to the $9,000 maximum. The commission reasoned that the trading prices for energy (as low as $1,200) were inconsistent with the supply scarcity. The following week, one Chambers County customer filed a proposed class action lawsuit alleging price gouging and seeking $1B in relief.
On February 26, ERCOT ejected Griddy from the Texas market for nonpayment.
Huh??
If your system automatically adjusts price to hit demand it will begin reducing the price, after all demand is lower than supply, how about $6000? $3000? $1200? Ah, that seems to be the magic number. At $1200 we can get 65GW of power.
But wait, we don't want 65GW of power. We want 100GW of power, the fact we can't have that means rolling blackouts. It makes no sense to cause rolling blackouts and reduce prices, the prices need to stay high until we can actually supply everybody.
In a more sensibly architected system, low priority industrial users are blacked out first, and if you must have rolling blackouts for residential customers you pin prices at maximum until you don't need blackouts due to recovering supply (or you use some emergency legal authority to compel generation at some agreed price).
But that's not Texas.
†For a variety of reasons you won't be able to cleanly shed arbitrary amounts of demand, just slice off big chunks and hope, in the process you're probably going to kill people.
> your region's generators are only able to supply 75GW of power maximum no matter what price you offer.
Want 100GW all you like, you won't get there. What are you trying to accomplish?
If your legislature (not to mention local culture) has insisted you must only use a hammer, those screws are getting hammered in, too bad.
If you have greater import/export capacity the higher prices ensure you're importing. In this particular case that would likely have made no difference, it's not as though the storm was just affecting Texas, but in other cases or with a smaller deficit that might save your backside.
Also as I understand it, some places pay generators for their capacity to deliver power if it were needed, even if in fact they're never needed. So that can be a better plan because it makes the incentive not to fail clearer.
I've actually been at a power plant where one block has never been switched on (except for maintenance). The block is there because it can be switched on, if necessary.
The texans wanted low prices and structured their pricing 100% for that: Power generators are paid 100% for being cheapest. Most other places use a combination of low pricing and availability, and the regulator will award contracts for availability to various generators that have different failure modes.
I don’t know the right answer but forcing electricity rates to the highest allowed limit for a week allowed these generators to make insane amount of money and i’m convinced it improved the outcome of this whole disaster.
What the regulators wanted to do was lock in the demand at "all of Texas wants electricity" until such time as that could be provided.
It's sort of funny that this "super free market" system Texas set up failed in so many different ways. Without this massive government intervention, Texas would still be in the dark because customers in the dark can't demand more electricity and therefore utilities wouldn't have any demand to supply enough electricity to turn them on.
When, say, 75% of demand is insensitive to price signals, to get the 25% of demand that is sensitive to respond takes a MUCH bigger pricing signal to have the same demand reduction than if 100% of demand was responsive to demand signal.
What's needed is, say, a guarantee of 25-50% of average consumption (or maybe enough for certain essentials) being charged at the base rate while the all the rest for everyone is charged at some multiple of the wholesale rate. But this only would work well if everyone had smart thermostats on their heat, their hot water, their airconditioners, and all other major power consumption sources. Otherwise people would be unaware of this pricing signal until the next month.
Also, maybe it'd be a good idea to have the main thermostat in the house (talking to the meter) show some estimate of the daily energy cost so people don't have to wait a month to find out they're using an insane amount of electricity somewhere.
Pricing signals work great (including for consumers) if supply/demand is elastic. If it's inelastic, it ends up looking like profiteering and passes on huge risks to those often least able to take them.
People have enough shit to be worried about than to worry about their power ticker going up and down. This is not something we should add as a burden to our citizens.
Next I'm going to hear people wanting to short electricity.
> The people signing contracts to buy Texas electricity at wholesale prices were doing so to economize. In some theoretical sense they accepted higher price volatility in exchange for usually lower prices, but in a much more practical sense they wanted the usually lower prices and couldn’t afford the higher price volatility. And then when prices rose they were wiped out.
> But the Griddy stories suggest that there’s something to it. It turns out to be really easy to accidentally engage in risky financial speculation, to somehow make disastrous bets on spot power markets in your monthly utility bill because it’s simple to sign up. If life is a constant series of high-stakes financial gambles anyway, perhaps it is tempting to choose some of your gambles on purpose.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-22/electr...
In the past, one could count on their hands and feet the number of contracts that one would enter into over one's life.
Now? There's so much churn that the act of accepting is more a ritual or formality. One that sadly has the capability to take advantage of a lot of people due to information asymmetry.
More recently - and still IMO OK - maybe you entered into more than 20 contracts in your life, but you were unlikely to have 20 contracts ongoing simultaneously. Today? I don't even know how many contracts or pseudo-contracts I'm involved in, but its in dozens.
That's my biggest reason I started to avoid SaaS and subscriptions as much as I can. Because every service you subscribe to is a relationship you enter, that you now have to manage, keep in mind. These add up quickly.
But I never in my wildest dreams imagined that rates would shoot to 100x normal values for days on end. The very claims of “it’s market driven!” made me think that was impossible - how could any efficient market sustain such prices?
Realizing now that I dodged a bullet.
I remember the Cal ISO rolling blackouts of 2000-2001.
Also applies to net neutrality and health-care btw.
What happens in such situations is electricity ends up being rationed with rolling blackouts. Or, if you manage to produce enough anyway by massive government investment, per capita energy usage skyrockets. The former situation happens in developing countries and the latter in oil-rich countries like Saudi Arabia which heavily subsidize electricity costs so it ends up being cheaper to just run the A/C at full blast constantly instead of properly insulating your household.
But most people don’t care about climate change, so maybe that’s the direction things would go.
Put the responsibility on the generators, not consumers.
Texas saw similar temps in late January, 2011, highs around 20°F, lows near zero. That was ten years ago. There weren't widespread outages.
ERCOT's planning excluded that recent history.
Free-market pricing seems wrong, as would per-minute pricing, but something like a 3-window (on-peak, off-peak, standard) time-of-day rate seems more acceptable.
That's a big if. In reality, they won't be adequately informed - they'll be at best adequately disinformed by the marketing departments of the power companies and third parties popping up around variable-pricing schemes. And to the extent exposing the customers to price variability is beneficial for the suppliers, the market has a nice way of removing the previously available options from the choice pool.
There's a spectrum between "let the people decide for themselves" and "the people will predictably decide to do something stupid and then they'll beg to be bailed out, so perhaps let's not offer that option", and I feel this may fall closer to that second end.
Heads you win; tails someone else loses; how much would you like to wager?
So a bunch of people do something obviously stupid - like getting scammed by a tech support call, or get infinite debt on a payday loan, or put a hand in a moving machinery and lose it. Now they're there, scammed, without money, and/or a hand. What are you going to do? Deny them healthcare and basic support? No, we help them anyway, and instead chase scammers, put limits on payday loans, and enforce safety requirements on equipment - we take away the choice of being stupid, because that's more reasonable than being indifferent to the suffering of victims of their own stupidity, for the sake of enforcing a corrective feedback loop.
If a traditional electricity supplier tried to buy all their electricity daily at the spot price and not hedge against any risk, they would quickly go bust. So why is it sensible for consumers to be allowed to do that? Some businesses may buy their energy at wholesale prices through their supplier, say an aluminium smelting factory. But those businesses will have full time traders who are also buying insurance/derivatives to protect against volatility in the market. Consumers should insure themselves against that risk too, by using a more traditional energy supply contract.
I worked at a power monitoring startup. We looked at states that had peak demand and tried to estimate commercial electricity bills and sent alerts if a business was close to its peak usage.
“ Some utilities will charge customers based on their individual peak demand. The highest demand during each month or even a single 15 to 30 minute period of highest use in the previous year may be used to calculate charges”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_demand
It’s hard to figure out what the charges are going to be.
There’s a massive programme in the UK to fit homes with meters that do this.
Also, due to Ofgem regulatory requirement all plans have a cap, so this couldn't happen. (It's not capped cheap of course, but it's not going to cost thousands/month. With Octopus specifically it translates to 35p/kWh cap on its variable rate plans, ~double recently typical prices.)
Another electricity billing method in the UK that may or may not be a novelty to Americans are pay-as-you-go meters, typically fitted in houses that have had problems paying their bills on a monthly basis.
The meter has a card reader built in and you buy the top ups from shops (anywhere I think - newsagents, gas stations). When you put the card in it, it tops up the balance, and when it hits 0 it cuts you off. This happens at random times if you forget to do it, you can just get plunged into darkness whenever. It's pretty dickensian shit and you don't hear as much about them these days, but I think lots of houses still have them fitted.
I think other utilities like internet service adopt this construct, then monetize worry to get you to pay a little more for all-you-can-eat.
There's an interesting quote from a former chairman of the atomic energy commission:
It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age
Even if climate change is as bad as WW2 (doubtful over the same time scale), people still had children then, and they still had children when every city was covered in a foot of horse poop, all your kids died at 14 and doctors didn't believe in handwashing. In fact they had more!
It takes a bit less than 3x resources to have 3 kids though, since they share things.
Wow. If you are only paying $12 a month for access to the grid, you are paying a small fraction of your share of the cost of maintaining the grid. These consumer solar subsidies are a massive subsidy from the poor to the wealthy and really aren't sustainable.
Residential solar IMO is mal-investment because grid scale solar has better economies of scale. Solar plants are easier to maintain. The grid is not built for widespread net metering. Rooftop solar has more fatalities than nuclear because of installers falling off.
You are likely confusing wholesale and retail prices of electricity. Even just considering solar, the cost for a utility to generate the power itself is likely between 2-4 cents per kilowatt. Most states require the utility to essentially pay the retail rate for electric power for any power generated by rooftop solar since it directly offsets the electrical usage. (Never mind that the electric power might have to be purchased when the utility doesn't want the power.)
Buffet has complained about how this issue:
>...His logic is simple, he wants to have to pay wholesale electricity rates for the energy generated by rooftop solar instead of the same price NV Energy is charging these customers since he says it will penalized customers without solar panels.
https://electrek.co/2016/03/01/warren-buffett-explains-his-l...
So unless you are using the wholesale price for the estimate for the value of the excess electricity generated, you are greatly overestimating its value.
Besides overpaying for the electricity generated by rooftop solar, your $20 access bill is another subsidy. One estimate is that the average yearly cost to maintain the grid is about $750 per customer.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/the-u-s-elec...
Why do you say that? If the government wants to subsidize solar power, isn't it better to do it in a way that is safer, less expensive and the benefits are shared by all consumers?
Essentially the effect of what you’re saying is poor people would be priced out of an essential utility to ensure rich people get a stable supply.
In Austin's cade, Austin Energy built out way too much off of essential circuits. Office buildings stayed lit because they trunked off a circuit feeding medical centers, emergency services, that type of thing.
So the only place Austin Energy could go for load shedding was their residential customer base. Even then; they didn't execute true "rolling" blackouts, because that implies dividing the supply of power you have somewhat evenly across your entire customer population in a reasonable time based multiplexing scheme so that everyone gets their chance to run the heat. To minimize the amount of time people go without any heat, and at regular intervals so people can plan their consumption.
Can't speak for other metroplexes, and the co-op I get power from did a perfect job.
Residential areas should maybe be the ONLY places where a fixed rate would be allowed. Everywhere else (commercial, industrial, etc) should have to have real-time pricing. That would reduce the swings in price since demand would be much more elastic.
I'm thinking about places in AZ/NV where some companies and even some municipality groups (i.e. bureaucratic/permitting type) have moved towards four 10 hour days instead of five 8 hour days.
This is a bit better for those employees QOL (since they get 3 day weekends all the time) and also benefited the employers since they could lower their power consumption for an additional day.
Or “if we took Wednesdays off instead of Fridays, we’d benefit from Friday power being cheaper than Wednesday power”.
I still think market-aware power metering is a good thing for large users.
No, that's not the case. The entire point of a market system is to encourage people to use the limited resources on the most critical needs first. However, since there is a fixed rate culture the end result is that everyone wastes energy on non essential needs.
There simply aren't enough rich people on the planet to steal all the 75GW and even if they did they would be broke in the end. I don't know where you got that idea. The rich are in the minority. Also, you're forgetting that rich people will waste more energy if their rates are artificially kept lower.
Poor folks would be insulated from the large swings in price by the 25-50% guaranteed price portion of the power supply. (And you could make the price guarantee portion progressive by making it a constant 3kW (averaged over an hour) or whatever regardless of house size, so smaller houses would have much more of their electricity at a fixed rate than larger houses.)
Now that said, having an electric system where this is necessary is itself a market failure.
They couldn't.
Either people still got hit by massive bills (thousands or tens of thousands of dollars), or they cut usage (voluntarily or otherwise) and froze to death or poisoned themselves trying not to.
Municipal water and sewerage perations couldn't function. Pipes froze and burst. Massive damage precipitated by underprovisioning, risk-shifting to the most vulnerable, and a gamble that lost.
Life ain't textbook neat.
Griddy was a great idea, but it wasn't for everyone. Especially those who don't have backup solar or generators.
Naw, it would have just shifted it to "Electricity Company cuts power to customers during Deadly Cold"
But considering the normal weather in Texas, I ain't too surprised if these things are rarities.
I gave up optimizing too much because my water heater forgets its temperature setting when you cut the power, and it's not like they paid me much anyway. Good thing I'm on the 100% renewable SVCE plan.
If all you use is LED lighting, low heat, and keep off your 'l33t gaming rig, you could make it through a high cost incident without losing power.
> In an electricity crisis, what you kind of want is to generate as much electricity as possible, and distribute it as efficiently and fairly as possible, and then send out bills later, and if people can’t pay the bills you sit down and figure out how to allocate the losses. Perhaps you have a Draconian allocation of “anyone who got the electricity has to pay the bill even if it takes the rest of eternity to work it off,” or perhaps you have some loss-sharing arrangement where the state or federal government eats some of the cost, or it’s allocated proportionally among ratepayers and utility shareholders over the next decade, or whatever. But you have some leisure to decide that, to have different stakeholders argue about it in different venues, if you let the electricity crisis turn into a credit crisis. If you just let it turn into a much worse electricity crisis then you miss your chance to fix it.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-26/startu...
It's an economic non-solution to the fact that there's excess demand in one place and excess production in another.
The problem in Texas had two root causes. One was that decades of climate change denial is starting to make black swan events more likely than they would have been otherwise.
This is unforgivably irrational, because these effects have been predicted - accurately - for decades now.
The second was that Texas decided it wasn't going to share power with other states, supposedly because federal regulation was somehow a bad thing.
Price discovery and rationing are ineffective mitigations for the irrational self-harming effects of poor strategic decisions caused by prioritising economic ideology over physical integrity.
Economics is full of these non-solutions. Price discovery is possibly one of the most common.
It's like having a tool box full of broken screwdrivers and wondering why the houses you build keep collapsing.
At some point "At least I saved some money because these tools were cheap" stops being a credible argument.
This is not just a Texas problem, and the fact it stayed isolated to Texas and didn't effect other States' adversely was entirely an artifact of Texas' independent grid.
>Price discovery and rationing are ineffective mitigations for the irrational self-harming effects of poor strategic decisions caused by prioritising economic ideology over physical integrity.
They are effective. High prices tell consumers to turn off their most energy intensive devices and only keep the devices on that they really need. It also encourages people to find alternative ways of reaching the same outcome without overburdening limited resources.
>Economics is full of these non-solutions. Price discovery is possibly one of the most common.
No, sorry but if you say something like this you just don't understand how markets allocate resources.
In the best case, they sent out a message to all their customers: "Your power prices are about to quintuple, disconnect now."
Some of those messages will bounce or be delayed. Some will arrive to people who can't read them immediately (in car, asleep, out of reach of device, doing something else). The people who actually do read the message then have to go around trying to adjust things-- hitting overloaded provider-change services, or scurrying around in the breaker box or running around the house pulling cords-- while the clock is ticking.
It might work if you eliminate the real-time decision process. I'm envisioning a modernized version of the central breaker box, where you could indicate on a per-circuit level the cut points. The decorative fountain pump cuts off at 8 cents per kWh, the kitchen appliances at 25, and the circuit running the mini-fridge containing your perishable medications will keep chugging at basically any price. This can be modeled and ran through simulations. You'd have to set this up during onboarding, and for optimal value, the house would have to be designed around it, to place outlets on different circuits where it could be useful.
But even that needs a need liability fallback if they don't relay the data accurately-- if a message is lost in communication and the house still thinks electricity is 10c/kWh, when it's $10, who's going to eat the difference? Who'd trust the system with that much money at risk?
Do things that de-risk your life. Make sure your health coverage is good, and not just the cheapest insurance plan. Make sure you have life insurance.
I have a pretty dark outlook when it comes to global warming, but when you're a griddy customer and you're watching your meter constantly, it just made sense. For a brief moment in time, a green future based on renewables felt realistic. For a brief moment in time, I felt like we might actually be able to meet carbon emission goals.
When it cost a lot to make electricity, I used less. When it cost very little, I used freely. When I was able to get paid to put a load on the grid, I sure as hell did. And whenever I was thinking about this, I was able to realize that everyone who wasn't a griddy customer was not remotely aware of what was going on with wind turbines nearby. Anyone on a flat rate plan set their themostat and forgot about it, because the cost to run their AC was fixed. Whereas when the wind wasn't blowing and it was hot out, I was aware that it meant burning more natural gas, and was perfectly fine with having my thermostat a bit higher because it was going to cost me more.
Regulation and politics have killed innovation, once again. Fuck that.
Griddy was a tiny portion of the market and the focus on them only benefits those who couldn’t keep the grid reliable and profited immensely.
from: https://www.griddy.com/post/griddy-update-why-energy-prices-...
Prices should have fallen and did not.
That was not an unrealistic policy decision. The unrealistic policy decision was leaving it stuck there even after things started to thaw and restore.
The market, as they say, she remains irrational far longer than you stay solvent.
As a consumer who doesn't work in the power industry, I don't really want to follow the power costs. When I feel cold, I want to turn the heat on. When the dishwasher is full, I want to run it. Having to do an additional mental check every time I want to use electricity sounds annoying and stressful for me.
Is a market based solution better for slowing down climate change? Absolutely. Is that more importance than convince? Yes. However it's not an innovation. It's the consequence of humanity realizing that a relatively common and easy to use source of energy is killing us and we suddenly can't use it.
I don't see floating market rate energy being a meaningful part of the answer to climate change. For every person like you who likes the direct feedback mechanism of market pricing, there will be 10 people who vote against it as a price increase and 100 who just won't care. More and more, it looks like the solution to climate change will be a combination of: cheaper renewables, better battery storage, some carbon intensive power generation to bridge the gap while we get to the previous two, and (in the far far future) fusion energy. Asking consumers to change their habits or reduce their energy consumption is a nonstarter.
Gas purchases are discrete events that, with extremely minimal planning are capable of being purchased from different outlets each time and, usually, time shifted to deal with per-provider or very short term spikes.
Electricity puchases are continuous and the ability to shift sources or time shift is often significantly less without much more significant planning.
Paying a premium for insurance against extreme variation makes some sense in either case, but a lot more in the latter case.
1. It would make it easier to predict how much I would need to pay for gas each month, and simplify budgeting.
2. I don't need to worry about keeping track of the current price of gas
3. Depending on how my driving schedule matches the variance in prices, it may actually be cheaper for me.
Octopus' is daily, and also offers an hourly plan 'Agile' with an API.
There is a regulatory cap on the cost of energy, which is a bit convoluted, but Octopus passes it on as a 35p/kWh cap on variable rate plans.
Yes. However...
During the deep freeze, the consumer utilities were bidding up the price of juice with money they did not actually have. Ordinary consumers should not be competing for electricity with buyers who are able to buy on margin.
Now we know that this can happen. Now we have to plan an alternative.
Now, not only did Griddy put its users at risk of high bills with these prices, the utilities bankrupted themselves putting these bids in too. The wind farm operators could only laugh while they were getting these crazy bids for every watt from a turbine that wasn't iced up, because they knew they were getting paid with imaginary money, and they were operating the windmills because what the hell else could you do?
The nat gas operators, well, they needed real money because they needed to buy gas at crazy prices, and the nat gas drillers needed money to get crews out to thaw out their infrastructure, which is extra important because we're talking about working outdoors in dangerous weather, and the crews are Texans that had not seen weather like this before.
So TLDR, none of this makes any sense, and it will be settled in bankruptcy court.
Household electricity use isn't something to be this concerned about i.r.t global warming that you create thousands of dollars of debts for Americans because they didn't watch a ticker for their electricity usage.
It's pretty privileged to be sad that a company that created millions of dollars of debt is going to be shut down.
https://www.griddy.com/post/griddy-update-why-energy-prices-...
See the big image midway through the article.
?
I'm not trying to claim that prices didn't naturally rise by a lot, but in that particular situation (linked above), it's very clear that a lot of customers were paying $9/kWh when they could have paid $0.03/kWh. The latter is obviously easier to afford.
This event sucked for griddy customers, no doubt. But for the state of Texas and ERCOT to lock the price 300x higher than it would otherwise be is ridiculous.
Lack of regulation and poor politics have killed people, once again. Griddy was a stupid solution to the wrong problem.
If the scientific method were applied to real planetary destruction we would rank the use of farmland as #1. If you doubt this, use Google earth and zoom in and notice the absolute scale of destruction farmland has done to the planet.
The planet has been 15 degrees hotter than it is today 150 million years ago. The fossil records show that this was an abundant time for the planet. Extinctions (including the most recent one) happen during ice ages. A hotter planet with more CO2 load would increase the greening of the planet.
Additionally, there is 33x H2O in the atmosphere than CO2. Look at the total spectrum absorption of H2O vs CO2 and you’ll find H2O is a more potent green house gas, having nearly the same dipole moment. If the run away green effect was possible with CO2, it would have already happened with H2O, but this has never occurred in geological timeframe, ever.
Additionally, all CO2 increases can already be mitigated via several technology stacks. One is the use of nuclear, which despite some accidents has the lowest death rate per terrawatt hour by an order of magnitude. Despite this astounding safety, the media has pushed to eliminate nuclear power even going so far as BANNING it under the green new deal.
Additionally, it was discovered by oceanographers in the 1980’s that surprisingly, phytoplankton, the largest natural sequestered of CO2 on the planet was bottle necked by... drum roll please... iron in the ocean!
Phytoplankton feeds zooplankton feeds fish. This is why there are record fish catches four years after a volcano eruption.
And when this was discovered by oceanographer John Mayer, who proclaimed “give me half a tanker of Iron and I will produce a new ice age”, the UN finally addressed this claim by systematically banning ALL study of any size of iron ocean fertilization in 2008, despite the immense protests of oceanographers around the world.
This embargo was violated in 2012 by rogue scientists off the coast of Vancouver BC who dropped a large quantity of iron off the coasts to prove that the iron would sequester this CO2, as well as Chili bucking the UN and going forward with its own studies on ocean fertilization.
And I’m not even going to touch on all the verified scandals in the IPCC other than to say that if CO2 was responsible for the warming then the international community could lay the whole issue to rest immediately by an experiment whereby liquifying the air into an 11 meter vertical column and throwing a heat lamp at the top and showing that tube A heated up X% more than tube B. But despite such an obvious and dead simple experiment that would forever win the global warming argument forever, has astoundingly, never been performed.
Infact if any millionaire is reading this and wants to settle this once for all, I offer to do the experiment, at cost, just to prove the world whether going from 300 parts per BILLION to 400 parts per BILLION actually makes that much of a difference, if any, to the two tubes.
To put that in perspective, if 11 meters of liquified air in a vertical tube represents the amount of air between your head and space, then the amount of CO2 floating on that 11 meters would measure 3mm, increasing to 4mm (+1mm from the industrialized era), while the amount of H2O would be a full 10 centimeters, give or take.
Once the scale of the difference of CO2, as a trace gas measured in PARTS PER BILLION is fully accepted onto the mind, the true absurdity of the failure to prove the CO2 super magic awesome heat trapping properties becomes so apparently rediculus that one can only go to the science papers to find this magic property. For surely, if CO2 was this great at trapping heat then it should be abundantly clear by SOME physical property that it is leaps and bounds above any other trace has that this is the case.
Yet when one looks into the “science” of human caused global warming, one gets bricked walled by a complexity argument driven by computer models with secret algorithms from the IPCC, who’s board members will benefit from the carbon credit tax, which would completely unravel with (1) the large scale adoption of nuclear or (2) the dusting of the oceans with iron composites.
Anyone can verify this narrative. I am not some an intel agent or compensated for this post in any way. Just an engineer that has spent WAY too many years going down every single rabbit hole that could have solved this problem but instead slowly realized that we as a human species have been guided down this fake environmental problem while the REAL environmental problem - farming, has all the air sucked out of it.
This post, despite being verifiable, will likely be deleted. For those that see this post before this happens, please do your due diligence and fact check this narrative. Do your own math.
Thank you for your consideration.
The rest of the post is better off speaking alone.
> A key question concerns the amount of iron dust that would be required to induce draw down of CO2 from the atmosphere. [...] In total, this estimate concludes that ~2.8 million tons of biogenic iron oxides would be delivered over 100 days per year to the iron-limited regions of the global ocean to reach conditions where iron was not limiting primary productivity.
Many other sources are available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization#References and friends, please add this one too!
Yes, H2O is the strongest greenhouse gas, but its concentration (~5000ppm average) is limited by temperature and it will condense out as mist/clouds/rain. CO2 is nowhere near saturation levels, so atmospheric levels of CO2 have been growing. [2]
By all means you can tell the world that we should go back to a planet that looks like it did 15M years ago (miocene), but a 40m sea level increase is a pretty hard sell and IMHO does not match the "this is fine" tone of your post.
CO2 tends not to liquify but forms solid dry ice, so CO2 is not present in "liquid air" [3] (nor is anything with a boiling point <80K). Your proposed "obvious and dead simple" experiment is flawed.
"an engineer that has spent WAY too many years going down every single rabbit hole" is hard to justify based on the easily-debunked assertions you make, but even if you are correct and farming is the biggest cause and that it can/should bear the brunt of reduction efforts, it does not follow that we should therefore ignore all other avenues to address the problem. Yes, iron may be a part of the solution, but can you not see that building wind turbines, insulating houses and having electric cars is less risky than dumping huge quantities of iron in the sea?
Please consider that there _is no conspiracy_ and that scientists are mostly underpaid humans with a deep interest in their areas of study. Also consider that we know that fossil fuel companies have been funding AGW-denial. If you want conspiracies, try looking there.
[1]https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/... [2]https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/climatescience/climatesci... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_air
How is your neighborhood supposed to stay the same if the planet is getting hotter over time? It might only be 1°C right now but since nobody really cares we are likely to head to something less reasonable like 4°C and that will definitively impact culture.
Now compare this with voter turnout by age bracket, and the current path of the world is pretty easy to see as people looking out for their own best interest, which is rational and what we are hardwired to do.
Let me address the H20 issue with the runaway global warming theory.
There is literally an ocean of H20, therefore the total load of H2O is elastic (unlike CO2). Hotter temperature -> more H2O in the atmosphere -> hotter temperature -> repeat.
Yet this hasn’t happened. The point about water condensing is besides the point, because water is also vaporizing and the equilibrium point is determined by temperature, which the runaway theory says is a divergent phenomenon.
Let’s rewrite the original assertion:
Higher Temperature -> Higher water vapor equilibrium —> higher temperature. This cycle can repeat endlessly because of the ocean.
As far as independent scientist doing global warming research on their own dime, this just isn’t true. There is public and private money set aside to study this.
Highly credentialed global warming skeptics like Judith Curry have generated around ~150 papers which conclude that global alarmism over human caused global warming is a “hoax”. Her actual words.
Astoundingly, there is a complete media blackout on this scientist and others like her. Infact a huge case the msm won’t cover anymore is the case of Tim Ball who decried global warming alarmism as pseudo science (Corruption of Climate Science Has Created 30 Lost Years," Jan 10, 2011).
He was sued for defamation by Michael Mann, the same person who was caught up in email scandal or manipulating climate data.
Tim Ball went to court and got discovery of Michael Mann’s climate date. 10 years later, the judge finally dismissed the case because Michael Mann failed to produce the data by the judges orders.
This is not “science” this is a religion run by a corrupt cartel.
See some examples which actually work in Norway, Finland and Estonia (connected to the [Nord Pool](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Pool)). http://www.eemg-mediators.eu/downloads/dynamic_pricing_in_el...
it wouldn’t be a problem if it were just a matter of paying a little more or less, that would be great.
but there are catastrophic tail risks. so you have to constantly be watching because if your vigilance slips for even a few hours at a crucial time it could financially ruin you. traders at least get paid to do this and can de-risk when they need to.
Good riddance.
Doesn't actually seem better for consumers?
For one, I suspect that ERCOT wouldn't allow a new company with this model access to the grid immediately, at least until this blows over a bit.
But regarding "thousands in debts"; I'm curious how that will be handled. It seems that these are debts to Griddy, but Griddy no longer exists, apparently for non-payment, which implies that ERCOT does not expect to be paid. Do these customers now owe this debt to ERCOT directly?
Griddy is shutting down. They exist for the moment, the debt they are owed is an asset, and even if they are dissolved their assets will be sold off to pay their creditors, so someone will be owed the money.
(Now, if that's John Oliver [0], maybe it also gets forgiven, but that's not the usual case...)
[0] https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/john-oliver-buys-15...
If Griddy is booted out of ERCOT, Griddy (or its assignees) probably can't prevent them from switching to other providers with a balance due, and probably can't have their electricity turned off for non-payment, so for customers that ended up with a balance due in the thousands, I expect they'll have to write off a lot of that.
(I'm not a lawyer, if I was a lawyer, I wouldn't be admitted in Texas, I didn't even read the law, just a web page that looked appropriate)
It would be really nice if rather than taking a low amount they sell it directly to the debtors themselves for such a markdown, but I guess they'd think that sets a bad precedent.
The other providers can only survive (assuming they do) by having overcharged for years.
I mean, I could be wrong, I"m not a CPA with their books in front of me... But I cannot see running a power network as anything but expensive.
Now whether they imvested properly or not, that remains to be seen. The fact that arlt least we didn't totally lose everything shows it wasn't all for naught.
What happened to personal responsibility?
The opportunity to engage more directly with the market would be cool and useful for folks with the technical chops to participate appropriately. And if everyone's smart appliances and bitcoin miners could actually cut themselves off with price spikes, _the grid would be healthier for it_.
I think of it like self-insurance. If you have the financial resources to weather the foreseeable eventualities, you can forego many traditional types of insurance. However, you have to prove that you have the money in the bank.
In this case, there was nobody checking that these wholesale customers had the technical chops to meaningfully participate in the wholesale market. THAT is the problem. The market should exist, but just like you can't register a car without either normal insurance or proving your self-insurability, you shouldn't get electrical service without either paying normal consumer rates or proving your ability to play the wholesale game.
Meanwhile getting run over by a semi-autonomous vehicle is a fairly direct consequence of such things.
I guess that sounds sarcastic, because probably for most people it's not worth it, but there's probably a point where the added overhead of the third party is worth the savings. Maybe then the third party insurer would be motivated to build active cost monitoring device that will cut the power to your house when the price gets too high. Do you trust your power provider to build un-backdooered logic, that they won't use for other purposes, for such a thing?
It being a third party also affords other opportunities, like, not buying the insurance and building your own power/price monitoring kit/algorithm. Suppose you are willing to pay a high premium to keep your freezer running but not the wall warts on all of your voltage-transformed devices?
Technically this company was trying to fulfill the market need driven by the deregulation, and trying to provide lower cost solutions to the consumer, but they needed to build something to help with these spikes. They could have eventually I think, but just a tough business frankly!
You mean, like, they could charge a slightly higher price most of the time, so they can shelter their customers from rare wild price fluctuations?
No one wanted to take the other side of a tail risk trade?
I wonder if they could have made tail risk bets that prices could spike during seasonal occurrences that had small fixed upfront costs, but high enough payout to absorb losses while still keeping prices lower than competitors. If they could have, none of us would be talking about this now (except maybe "How one energy company won big betting that energy prices would eventually spike").
Really seems like it should be on TX to make the customers whole here, given that they ordered Griddy to pass along huge amounts of money to producers for days.
Incorrect. ERCOT set a price ceiling, not a price. The wholesale price without the ERCOT price ceiling would have been far, far higher than $9000 kwh. That ERCOT is at blame for the price ceiling is absurd.
* ERCOT is to blame for a lot of other things though.
disagrees with you
Which part do you think they're mis-reading?
> “Because energy prices should reflect scarcity of the supply, the market price for the energy needed to serve load being shed in the face of scarcity should also be at its highest,” the PUC’s news release stated.
> The PUC added, “The decision was spurred by ERCOT’s discovery that energy prices across the system were clearing at less than the current system-wide offer cap of $9,000 established by Commission rule.”
> In addition, the PUC ordered wholesale prices be backdated to February 15 when the storm escalated circumstances in the state.
It's not like any generator is making money having a power plant sit idle, they are losing tons. Any positive price is incentive enough, but no level of price can make whatever is causing the outage to be fixed in 4 days. The Texas grid is an entirely isolated system.
> ERCOT has informed the Commission that energy prices across the system are clearing at less than $9,000, which is the current system-wide offer cap pursuant to 16 TAC §25.505(g)(6)(B)... The Commission believes this outcome is inconsistent with the fundamental design of the ERCOT market... the market price for the energy needed to serve that load should... be at its highest.
It’s not exactly plain English, but the Public Utilities Commission is pretty clearly telling ERCOT that they should ignore the current clearing rates and raise prices until there’s enough power or they hit the $9,000 ceiling, whichever comes first.
https://www.griddy.com/post/griddy-update-why-energy-prices-...
It links to source material that mostly reads as gibberish to me but does seem to make clear near the start that PUCT/ERCOT have the power to change the price and were unhappy that it was lower than $9000.
Pinning the price to the maximum as a last-ditch effort to try to force producers online is what they did last week.
A) There are actually 2 price ceilings. The $9000/MWh is the "high" cap. The situation lasted for long enough that they were supposed to switch to the "low" cap of (the greater of) $2,000/MWh or 50x the natural gas price index. Due to the also high price of natural gas during the crisis, this "low" cap ended up being higher then the "high" cap.
B) To protect the grid at a techincal level, portions of it were disconnected (load shedding). The result is that the "market" value within the grid that remained connected actually did drop below the cap. Since this only happened because supply was so low that some consumers couldn't buy at any price, the decision was made to set the price to the cap to better reflect the full demand instead of just the demand that was still connected.
Before PUCT pegged the prices, we were able to load-shift our showers, heat, and device charging to parts of the day where there actually was still sufficient supply to drive prices down under 50c/kWh.
Even if you aren't shifting your use around, there's a really big difference in the total damage done by power rates pegged at $9/kWh 24/7, and power that was occasionally hitting this rate but was otherwise ~averaging somewhere on the order of $2-3/kWh over a 24h period early on in the crisis.
The day before PUCT pegged the rate had a few hours of relatively tolerable prices. Thankfully we lost power for nearly a full day of the fixed $9/kWh rate.
This strikes to me as a typical American solution to peoples crass financial ignorance: socialize the debts. Here is what happens next:
> If buyers are not able to cover their bills, Ercot will pay the generator and the charges will ultimately be spread out to other market participants, including other generators and traders, as permitted by regulations.
When all their customers were in a position, however, where they needed electricity from Griddy, but no one had any to sell... Well... That's why spot buying can leave you with your arse out in the cold.
I do feel sympathy for those caught out, but I also understand what Griddy's intent was, even if I think the position and business model they chose was unwise. It goes good when its all good, but when things go bad, you have a responsibility to have been planning for that eventuality.
It sucks. It feels wrong that it should end up happening that way. That's kinda jow life rolls though. At least, has been for me.
This feels too much like victim blaming for me to agree with. In general, people are lead to believe "wholesale" just means something like "cheaper in bulk" à la Costco. I am sympathetic to anyone who was ignorant of the fact that it meant their personal rates could be much much higher too.
1. You're directly in this position due to choices you made.
2. The "perpetrator" is mother nature.
The fact that ERCOT sets the prices makes this whole situation complicated, I have no clue if anyone actually broke the law here. But certainly setting the price this high was immoral, useless, and just a transfer of money from people buying electricity to the people who were already producing as much electricity as they could at 1/10th the price. The fact that these people participated in the wholesale market assuming that that market operated under the normal norms of western civilization is not particularly their fault, but an entirely reasonable thing for them to have done. The solution to this problem is not to not let people participate in markets, but to make markets actually follow the normal norms of civilization and not engage in unethical price gouging during emergencies.
[1] https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/consumer-protection/dis...
For the power producers on the other hand, it seems exceptionally clear (to me anyways) that this was just state-sponsored price gouging: https://theintercept.com/2021/02/23/texas-winter-storm-gas-p...
nope.
https://www.natlawreview.com/article/don-t-mess-texas-price-...
>Unlike many state price gouging statutes, [Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Act] does not contain an exception for increased costs.
And what're you supposed to do, sell at a loss because there's a disaster on? Or is it not just during disasters?
Presumably you're allowed to close business instead, but why's that better; no widgets are better than expensive widgets?
You literally had machines running on redline to keep up with demand because so much generation capacity went offline at the same time, and the weather precliuded deployment of either the personnel or equipment to handle it safely and quickly.
That is why the statutory max price was set. If you were going to use that power, and put that generating capacity at risk, so PUC thought, you were going to pay for it. They figured the pricing signal would control demand.
Well... They were wrong.
"Your debt collection stops being my concern when my and my dependent's survival is on the line." --Every human being in the back of their head, in the lizard brain, ever.
Sure, it feels bad afterward, and you try to follow what guidance you can at the end of the day, and reach out to those you're in a position to reasonably help, but that was a demand inelastic situation. Be able to pump a certain threshold of BTU's into your environment by money, barter, burning, or retaining via insulation... Or die.
I'll give ERCOT and PUC the benefit of a assumption of reasonability given info at the time; but I really can't forgive the human nature centric myopia that the homo economicus model has foisted on the world.
>Well... They were wrong.
I don't think they ever thought it would reduce demand, they just thought it would increase supply. The reasoning for not reducing demand is simple: most consumers pay fixed rate plans, so if you were at home and had power, there really wasn't any incentive for you to reduce power consumption.
Not really, raising the prices also increases supply (eg. hiring workers to work overtime to get it fixed, or renting out expensive equipment to get it fixed faster), as well as discouraging non-essential use (if electricity costs $5/kWh you sure as hell are going to do everything in your power to cut your usage, rather than blasting the space heater to a comfy 75 degrees).
Most economists are also against price-gouging laws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_gouging#Opposition_to_la...
Texas was quite obviously well beyond that second point during this crisis.
Moreover that only excuses the people who actually had those extra expenses of charging more. The rest of the producers of electricity are morally (and under normal circumstances legally) obligated to not also raise their prices just because they can.
Are they? I'm sure if the electricity rate was high enough it'd be worth it to airlift diesel generators across the country to make up the shortfall. Hell, you can probably fly in temp workers from europe/asia to do the necessary fixes.
This event lasted 3 days. You think these private entities had the ability to coordinate airlifting generators (for what it's worth, IIRC fuel was the problem, not generators), and bringing in foreign skilled labor, to address a situation that will last a couple days?
If your next argument is going to be "The US Government/Military can do it" expect my response to be "If the US government can solve this problem for it's citizens during a crisis, it should be doing so whether the set price of electricity is >$9/kWh or not"
Restricting them to a maximum 25 percent markup for all that effort (i.e. making them eat a loss) will obviously prevent people doing it. It's still just another example of the economic rule that price fixing creates shortages.
People can deal with propping up a profit for someone going out of their way to get something done as cheaply as they can. Where they get annoyed is when you have the help there, but hold it hostage because you aren't feeling like people are willing to pay you enough. Not once on showing justifiable expenses has anyone ever argued at me being unreasonable.
Further, there's a point of diminishing returns where individual action is best avoided or at least organized to increase effectiveness.
Have your town pool money to hire tankers to run down instead of filling your pickup with gas cans. Force multipliers.
Price gouging laws are there to hedge civic stability. You can't organize people to solve a problem peacefully and efficiently if they're taking up torches amd pitch forks against those greedy haves. Everyone has to still be set, plus a bit extra to give to get community driven force multiplication.
Apparently Griddy couldn't pay the bills their customers racked up, or is waiting on customers paying their $10k power bills?
But it looks like Griddy had set up customer billing on a prepaid system. You had to deposit $49 to start, and they'd debit your usage as you went. If your balance was low, they'd charge your credit card on file. I would bet at least some customers' hit their credit card limits and their Griddy accounts have a negative balance.
Even for those customers they successfully charged, they may not be able to access that money right away. Some of their customers are likely to dispute the charges, and others will take a long time to settle their negative balances. Griddy would need to have a lot of reserves to pay their current bills while waiting for their customers to pay, and they clearly don't have them; also, it seems like they were unable to get extra capital at the drop of a hat, like Robinhood was when they needed it recently.
So, it wasn't really Griddy's choice during the emergency. After the emergency, there's not much of a point to cut people off, as the normal usage is peanuts compared to what was incurred during the emergency.
[1] https://assets-global.website-files.com/5df01ca286f5a984f50c...
It's a good thing that I didn't because griddy customers are the ones that got multi-thousand dollar electricity bills after the recent Texas disaster.
It might be a good idea for whole-house generator companies, actually: offer your customers the same thing as Griddy except with the option of automatically switching to your generator if rates get insane. It's actually good for everyone as it reduces grid power consumption.
In fact, I want to see a grid-connected solar/battery/inverter with a dual-fuel (natural gas/propane) generator that feeds into the inverter/charger and then possibly into the grid. That'd be sweet.
A wholesale-only Griddy company could avoid the negative publicity if they only sold to folks with backup power options.
If you had local battery storage, and decent forecasting for house demand and spot prices, I think you could have some fun and save some money. Bonus if you can coordinate loads too. Of course, the more people who do that, the flatter the price curve gets, and the less incentive there is to do it.
Tweaking Griddy's business model would be viable:
wholesale prices + X% with a cap of no more than +Y% increase in pricing per month. This way, there is price stability for the customer and no insane, surprise bills.
In truth, public utilities should just operate this way to begin with rather than turning inelastic demand necessities into a casino.
But, if I received a link to this page from my utility company, I would instantly feel a strong aversion towards them for the following reasons:
1. It's using a flat design image of a hand pushing a button, which might be the most generic, tech corporate aesthetic. This is a bizarre way of encapsulating the message of "We cannot feasibly perform as a reasonable service to our consumers so we're being shut down".
2. There is a reference to the word "Family". I love my family, but my relationship with them is entirely different than what I might expect from a utility company.
3. The message ends with "You will always be a Griddster.
A heartfelt thank you, The Griddy Family"
This is the most confusing message of all.
If my electric company was shutting down after charging an exorbitant bill with this message, I would be furious. This is peak corporate speak.
I think this message is probably not what a customer would want to read and I hope people in Texas can find a service that not only works but doesn't provide such corporate-speak to a situation that really amounts to them not accounting for a major catastrophe.
I think it would be reasonable for them to own up to what happened and really speak to that instead of the message they put out. The people that used this service deserve better than this
I LOVED Griddy. It was an amazing product that gave users the power to dictate the terms of their energy consumption based upon grid load. When energy usage was high and they needed to fire up natural gas or diesel plants to meet demand my price would change above the 10c/kwh threshold and my energy usage would fall off as my smart home would automatically shut off lights, adjust the a/c or heater, etc. Further, I was able to take advantage of excess wind energy at night by running my dishes, washing my clothes and charging my car on scheduled off peak times.
Until a "100 year" storm comes along, and makes the wholesale price of electricity $9 per kWh. Now instead of saving $20, you owe $8,800 more than usual.
Until this month wiped out my savings the entire time (I was able to jump ship soon enough to "only" rack up $1300 of electric bills with them lol)
1) a fixed rate per kilowatt hour, regardless of what the wholesale cost is. 2) a variable rate per kilowatt hour, which is wholesale cost.
If supply is up and demand is low, wholesale prices drop, so the customer pays less per kWh and ostensibly less per month. In that same vein, if supply is down and demand is high (like when power plants literally freeze and supply from other sources can only trickle in), wholesale prices rise and this increase is passed directly to the consumer.
On the other hand, fixed rate consumers pay the same per kWh regardless of whether the wholesale cost is high or low.
So when prices skyrocket to $9/kWh, wholesale customers are on the hook for it, but fixed rate customers will still be enjoying 10.98[1] cents (yes, that's $00.1098) per kWh because their utility provider has to deal with it.
You are correct, but I feel this phrasing vastly overstates how common Griddy's real time pricing is (well... was). Griddy was a startup and the only provider offering this type of plan. A few of my techy coworkers used them, but most people wouldn't have even been aware this was possible.
Griddy defaulted and was unable to pay their financial obligation to the market. They tried to put some marketing spin on this but simply put, if you cannot pay your obligations, then ERCOT will initiate the default procedure. This is terrible for the remaining market participants who are still solvent because now Griddy's debts will be shared by the market.
Griddy should inform the public how much exactly of the $2.1B short pay they are responsible for.
That pun seems particularly insensitive given the context.
Edit: You know a bunch of people died because they couldn’t heat their houses right? https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/02/25/texas-power-...
Edit: thanks, guys!
Griddy is a very small part of the market and didn’t make any additional profit from the raised prices but all the same they have had a lot of press.
Griddy allowedpeople to pay lower wholesale rates when times were good at the cost of beimg along for the ride if things ever went off the rails like they did last week.
Texas actually has some fairly generous consumer protection laws for things like these 5 figure power bills, so Griddy will likely not be able to recoup their losses from keeping the power going for their customers.
Least that was my understanding.
To be clear, the emergent system that comes from a free-ish market is an amazing thing and works very well in most cases. ... Just not well for critical infrastructure.
The reason appears to basically be what you say - they are critical infrastructure, and if they are sued out of existence, there won't be an electrical utility. It's not like a normal market where customers can just buy wooden toys from someone else.
It must be nice to have all the rewards of being a private business with all the risk of being a sovereign government.
what we should all want are fair markets, where each participant is widely informed and not under coercion by other participants. regulations should only be used for the purpose of ensuring the fair market for all, including and especially individual consumers, not advantaging any particular entity as is often the case now.