(02-21-2021 07:56 PM)UofMstateU Wrote:  

(02-21-2021 07:47 PM)solohawks Wrote:  Whats the deal with the $5000 power bills I've been reading about?

yea, that doesnt make sense. I saw one was supposed to be $17K. Most homes have a 200 amp breaker box. If I were to pull max amperage 24hours per day for 30 days, my electric bill would only be about $3500. And it would be really hard to do that considering most homes in the south use heat pumps, and they would only be able to pull about a quarter of that if they ran all the time.

Now I could see that if these are ranchers and they are heating livestock, poultry, etc. (ie commercial)

My guess is these are people who used a provider called "Griddy". Griddy customers get extremely low rates because the service allows them to buy surplus power on the spot market, which 99% of the time is far cheaper than the contracted rates offered by most traditional electric providers. However, there is a catch with using this method to save money on your power bill---the customer using this service is taking on the full risk of elevated power pricing during periods of extreme use when the spot market goes crazy. During times of extreme energy use when the surplus electricity essentially doesnt exist, Griddy users are in the same position as any other electric provider desperately trying to buy whatever energy they can from any provider available. When that happens, spot market prices can skyrocket like they did just a few days ago. To help its customers navigate that risk, Griddy has an app that alerts users of the situation so they can immediate reduce power usage or even jump to another provider during periods of extremely high spot market prices. During this latest freeze crisis, Griddy even took the unprecedented step of literally advising its users to leave the service. My understanding was during the height the crisis a single killowatt hour was running $9---so Griddy bills were skyrocketing at a ridiculous pace during that time of high usage. The only thing that might have save some users was being caught in an extended rolling blackout. That said, you'd still have to use a crap load of energy to get to 17K in just 3 or 4 days of this kind of energy market. Two or 3K could happen pretty easily.