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Comment by bvinc | Hacker News Reader

I always thought this was a good idea for a company. Almost all of the electricity providers in Texas all buy energy at wholesale prices and lock customers into long term contracts. If you were an electricity provider, what would be the best plan that you would want for yourself and your friends? My answer to that would be to have access to buy energy at the cheap wholesale prices for a flat monthly fee. This seems to be the griddy model and I almost switched to them.

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.

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It's a good idea if you have a whole-house generator giving you optionality. Even running on diesel, it's only like 50 cents per kWh vs $9/kWh. If you chop off the most expensive part of the curve, wholesale can save you a lot.

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.

There's a bit of an issue in that you don't really want to run your generator for too many hours. I think mine wants service every 100 hours or every year whichever comes first. Maybe 100 hours is enough for actual backup and substantial peak shaving though; I certainly haven't studied the spot prices in TX, as I wouldn't live there. ;)

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.

I had been kicking that idea around in 2019 after the huge system load ERCOT experienced resulting in record spot prices. My estimate was I could generate around 2 mil/year on a 10 million dollar investment offering battery to grid during peak load hours.

100 hours is quite a long time. If the wholesale electricity price is $9/kWh during these super peaks and you have a 10kW generator, that’s $9000.

After spending $10K on a generator.

I did switch to them for a month, 2 summers ago. My typical summer bills would be around $100-$150. After a $350 monthly bill from Griddy, I immediately bailed. Glad I did...

The problem with the griddy model is that there is no price cutoff beyond which you simply refuse to consume electricity and e.g. just buy a generator and run heating from that.

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