Don't get me wrong, there's still some amount of concerns about some of these charges. There are a lot of complicated things going on there, a number of court cases, and there's definitely a mixture of things going on. I was buying electricity through a retail electric provider (REP) who ended up folding and selling my contract to a new REP after the freeze so I and everyone else with a fixed contract in the deregulated areas had practically zero impact, maybe slightly higher delivery charges. Other people are on co-ops, and they might have to have some extra payments in their bills spread over a few years to cover the costs (depending on some court cases) or have their co-ops get pretty heavily restructured. Then there are some municipal electric companies who were often mixed, as sometimes those had generating capacity (so if those stayed online they
received these huge payments or balanced out) and sometimes they didn't.
But those people showing their $20,000 home electric bills? Far outliers, way outside the norm. They had signed up specifically for spot price energy plans without realizing what that really meant. I do imagine a number of people probably really didn't understand their plans, as its really easy to change plans and Griddy did a lot of direct selling.
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/17/puc-appeals-court-ur...
For a lot of people though there was confusion related to energy prices increasing after the freeze, which was correlated but not necessarily caused from the freeze. Global gas prices shot sky high, a lot of LNG capacity was added for export, a huge amount of Texas electricity is from gas, so electricity prices increased around that same time. Not necessarily from the freeze though, but most people weren't paying attention to the natural gas prices.