Bull Texas Snowpocalypse is over, felt kinda cute, may delete later...

Looks like that baby needs to be warmed up and filled with smoky goodness!

Looks like it's running on the cool side.

She needs a blanket!

Mannydog said:

Looks like that baby needs to be warmed up and filled with smoky goodness!

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If he was like a lot of us, he didn't have any electricity to run it unless he had a generator. Now people are really starting to feel the pain. There are reports of some already getting electric bills of $1000 to $5000 because of the spike in electricity cost during the week.

And the last couple days have been in the 70s by afternoon, wild weather.

As for the electric bill thing, yeah it's happened, even one guy got a bill for over $16k on the week. There's a lot of nuance as to the whys behind that which requires thought and understanding. A portion of our citizenry doesn't like that Texans are more independent than some others and those people have a large megaphone, so you'll be hearing lots of negative stuff about the Texas power grid. Some will be marginally true, a lot will be incomplete or fabricated speculation disguised as "news". The glitches in our power grid management will be repaired just like downed lines, broken pipes, and shattered water heaters. Unusual events most often result in unusual problems.

Uncle Bob said:

And the last couple days have been in the 70s by afternoon, wild weather.

As for the electric bill thing, yeah it's happened, even one guy got a bill for over $16k on the week. There's a lot of nuance as to the whys behind that which requires thought and understanding. A portion of our citizenry doesn't like that Texans are more independent than some others and those people have a large megaphone, so you'll be hearing lots of negative stuff about the Texas power grid. Some will be marginally true, a lot will be incomplete or fabricated speculation disguised as "news". The glitches in our power grid management will be repaired just like downed lines, broken pipes, and shattered water heaters. Unusual events most often result in unusual problems.

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What? No cover? Proves that no place is safe from bad weather.

Uncle Bob said:

And the last couple days have been in the 70s by afternoon, wild weather.

As for the electric bill thing, yeah it's happened, even one guy got a bill for over $16k on the week. There's a lot of nuance as to the whys behind that which requires thought and understanding. A portion of our citizenry doesn't like that Texans are more independent than some others and those people have a large megaphone, so you'll be hearing lots of negative stuff about the Texas power grid. Some will be marginally true, a lot will be incomplete or fabricated speculation disguised as "news". The glitches in our power grid management will be repaired just like downed lines, broken pipes, and shattered water heaters. Unusual events most often result in unusual problems.

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I hope you are right. I read an article that said the same thing happened back around 2010 or 2011, though it wasn't state wide. They were supposed to put a lot of measures in place then but ultimately nothing was ever done. My main issue with the whole ordeal was the lack of "uniformity" of the black outs. I was lucky and mine would go out for 30 minutes to 45 minutes. But I had coworkers where theirs would stay off for hours at a time. Then there were others that never lost power, and they were no where near a hospital or fire station.
As for cost, I'm not sure how those people are getting billed such high bills. Our electric company sent out an email over the weekend saying at this time our rates had not changed. With all that was going on there was no way to determine the cost of the electricity. So someone is lying and my bet would be on the one trying to get the most money now.

opus said:

I hope you are right. I read an article that said the same thing happened back around 2010 or 2011, though it wasn't state wide. They were supposed to put a lot of measures in place then but ultimately nothing was ever done. My main issue with the whole ordeal was the lack of "uniformity" of the black outs. I was lucky and mine would go out for 30 minutes to 45 minutes. But I had coworkers where theirs would stay off for hours at a time. Then there were others that never lost power, and they were no where near a hospital or fire station.
As for cost, I'm not sure how those people are getting billed such high bills. Our electric company sent out an email over the weekend saying at this time our rates had not changed. With all that was going on there was no way to determine the cost of the electricity. So someone is lying and my bet would be on the one trying to get the most money now.

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I'll give you a bit of what I've learned, but it really is a very nuanced thing that actually dates back to WWII, with lots of twists and turns. I'm not going into full detail, first because there's even more than I know/learned, and second, I'd be at the keyboard all day just to get part of the story out. Anyone interested in the full stuff should research, but I would recommend local Texas reporting as the "National Media" are hacks, and are purposely slanting the stories to serve their ideological masters.

There's a story behind the uneven rolling black outs, some of which isn't probably fully known as yet. It's basically tied to the way power is distributed at an equipment style level. And there's an automation variance factor as well. At our house we had pulsing power for near two days, followed by near 3 days of full outage.

The billing thing is real both in speed and dollar amount, BUT there are mitigating factors there. Folks outside this area should know that here in Texas we choose an electricity supplier (maybe more correctly a billing company as the power is from the same supply system for each within each geographic locale). Some bill a flat rate, some bill based on usage tiers, and then there are the ones that have made the news for the outrageous amounts in a short time. Human nature comes into play as it often does. The guy that got the $16k bill that the biased media is playing up was probably bragging a couple or more weeks ago about how smart he was in choosing a billing company that passed on only a rate based on the wholesale price. So, much of the time he probably does have a marginally lower bill than his "neighbors" per unit. But, wholesale is very volatile when things don't go smoothly. As power becomes scares, the market bids up the price as long as they want to stay in the supply game. The scarcer it gets, the higher the price..............and here it got REAL scares REAL fast so that the last units of KWH were highest in part to discourage use. Well, said article subject probably wasn't watching minute by minute, and the billing company probably has a comparatively simple calculation program that is designed for 99% of the time................but last week was the 1%. He's also on direct pay, so their simple program just went into his account as it normally does and withdrew the funds. I haven't seen a rational follow up article to confirm, but I suspect that there's some negotiation going on currently that will bring his actual/eventual bill down considerably. And likely there will be some state regs, new or modified, that will require these billing companies to change their programing, perhaps something similar to what Wall Street did a few years ago when trading programs acted too either accelerate buying or selling at crazy rates in response to market oddities. Now they stop trading at a certain point that alerts humans to go in, analyze, and adjust so that the market doesn't go crazy because the machines don't think they just do what they're told.

Again, there's a lot of bowel churning for a unique situation that would have remain unknown had we not had an extremely rare occurrence. Your comment about 2011 is accurate though, in that we got a warning that things similar to this could be problematic. Personally I think the ERCOT management is inept for things beyond the mundane and worse, several top management types live out of state. That will probably change, but we'll see. Okay, my fingers are ready to fall off, hope this clarifies a bit of the puzzle.

Uncle Bob said:

There's a story behind the uneven rolling black outs, some of which isn't probably fully known as yet. It's basically tied to the way power is distributed at an equipment style level. And there's an automation variance factor as well. At our house we had pulsing power for near two days, followed by near 3 days of full outage.

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Our utility said it was partially based on usage. Areas that were using a lot more power were turned off more because it saved more. I have to assume they are not lying to us.

I'm curious to see if anything happens to the people that are on fixed rate plans. I wonder if there is some fine print that allows the company to make up for the big difference in times like last week.

I'm surprised we haven't heard anything about huge gas bills. They have already had an article about Mr. Jones making millions that week because the price of natural gas went up so much.

I was pleasantly surprised at my usage. I was on emergency heat almost the entire week because my heat pump was frozen solid. I figured the usage would have been a lot higher.

Maybe one last dose of reality for anyone interested. I get weekly notices of prior week electrical use and cost, so today I got the report for "the week from hell". I probably pay, on average, a couple cents per kwh more than the guy noted several posts up who got the $16k bill on the "wholesale" billing plan. My bill for that week was about $160. That had 2 1/2 days with no usage, and roughly 1 1/2 days of heavy use getting the house and three refrigerator/freezers back up to normal use temp. I'd say a huge majority of folks in this state got something more like my experience than the sensationalized reports you folks out of state have seen reported. We're in a sad state where "news" is driven by click bait reporting.

NICE .... for Texas !
But that is what we can get on any given overnight at our place .... when I forget to put the Cover back on !

DenStinett said:

NICE .... for Texas !
But that is what we can get on any given overnight at our place .... when I forget to put the Cover back on !

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But is your night time low 5 days later 68 degrees!

Uncle Bob said:

Maybe one last dose of reality for anyone interested. I get weekly notices of prior week electrical use and cost, so today I got the report for "the week from hell". I probably pay, on average, a couple cents per kwh more than the guy noted several posts up who got the $16k bill on the "wholesale" billing plan. My bill for that week was about $160. That had 2 1/2 days with no usage, and roughly 1 1/2 days of heavy use getting the house and three refrigerator/freezers back up to normal use temp. I'd say a huge majority of folks in this state got something more like my experience than the sensationalized reports you folks out of state have seen reported. We're in a sad state where "news" is driven by click bait reporting.

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It is already getting interesting. Brazos filed for bankruptcy. It said that for the 7 days of winter weather it racked up close to $2.1 billion in charges compared to $774 million for all of 2020. ERCOT is currently $1.3 billion short of what is owed to producers. I read one source that said the state may dip into it's "rainy day" fund to pay what is owed. I also saw that the Texas AG has already filed a lawsuit against the company that was sending out the big bills and they were barred from the states power market on Feb 26th.