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Comment by pelorat | Hacker News Reader

None of this is passed over to consumers, the difference is pocked by the providers. It doesn't matter if the price slips into negative, my provider charges me €0,394/KWh regardless (Eneco in the Netherlands).

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Nowhere in Europe allow consumers to take the entire risk/ reward because it's unconscionable. If the actual price of electricity on the market soars to $10000 per MWh, and you need to run your dialysis machine, European politicians (unlike apparently Texans) don't think it's OK that you're now bankrupt.

However, you can in several places choose to have a limited exposure, e.g. in the UK Octopus Energy will let you risk paying say £350/MWh at peak times, but also pay say -£50/MWh when it decides to blow a gale at 3am on an autumn night when most people are asleep. Both reward and (more significantly) risk are capped.

Of course you can. I have about a hundred options for hourly pricing here in Sweden.

One company a few friends are using is Tibber.

https://tibber.com/

Mmm. Where can I see that Tibber has complete exposure? Maybe there's a story you can link like "Thanks to Tibber I lost almost €8000 in one month, and had to move back in with my parents" ? The blurb is much the same as Octopus, lots of feel good, not much specifics, I know Octopus is prohibited from offering full exposure, and you can see in its users' metrics that sure enough on a cold still winter evening prices just stop climbing at a certain cut-off.

Several providers offer full exposure in Sweden. It is particularly used by people with electric cars who want to charge it as cheap as possible. And yes you can end up with 8000€ electricity bill if you are really not careful.

Why would that even be a thing? I would have thought that these hourly pricing schemes have some sort of price cap so that you get a localised blackout and get a chance to turn off your biggest consumers.

No individuals were bankrupted by the bills from the 2021 storm. Griddy waived the fees associated with it:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/griddy-energy-charged-9000-powe...

Is there anything preventing the Texas energy company from offering something similar? Alternatively, maybe an insurance company could effectively insure against high prices.

The residents who were paying market rate for power elected to do so prior to the event occurring. The default billing configuration is a much more stable price.

How often are the rates negative? Can they end up paying you? Would it make sense to put a large electric heater outside to max out your usage during negative rates?

To answer my own question... Most UK homes have 100 Amp supplies, so maxing out every 30 minute segment for the year would give you:

    2022  £  53.83
    2021  £   4.41
    2020  £ 111.14
    2019  £   5.45

So probably not worth it!

Data from: https://energy-stats.uk/agile-price-plunges/

Consumers in Finland (and as far as I know, in other Nordics too) can get Nordpool spot priced electricity contracts, doesn't really get truly negative since you need to pay margin, taxes and transfer anyway.

In Denmark most providers charge you hourly rates.

Here is, for example, the page of my current provider: https://www.ok.dk/privat/produkter/el/priser

This page doesn't yet include the additional costs (last mile...), but there is definitely a big difference whether I consume the energy at cheap or expensive hours.

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