Nobody is going to pay that. It's the equivalent of charging someone a million dollars for a glass of water in the desert.
There is no legitimate business transaction here where one side is forced to agree to exorbitant fees for electricity when the only other option is dying with your family.
I foresee this being overturned either voluntarily or via the courts.
The coldest weather on record created the highest power demand on record, which created the greatest natural gas demand on record.
A free market, operating normally, would expect to see record natural gas prices at the same time. This isn't some scheme to defraud Texans. This is how a free market works.
If you want to protect yourself against price surges like that, the free market allows you to do so. Hedges on critical commodities are a thing for a reason. You just have to prepare before the emergency.
Texans took care of one another, largely without government interference.
That's MAGA af.
Don't cry like a simp because the free market operated properly.
If government regs made it worse, then you should be pissed.
We don't need any of this "boo hoo hoo, everyone in the country needed to stay warm all at once, and I had to compete with others for the limited supply of natural gas".
That's how it works, and reality doesn't care about your feelings. GTFO with that socialist BS.
Charging someone $17k for survival is NOT maga as fuck. It's is the most oligarchy Democrat big brother, government backed theivevery bullshit I have ever seen.
Maga is making america great, not fucking people over and enslaving them with debt.
There is NO free market for energy. Everyone who sells it does so on behalf of the government with their consent.
You can't buy it from someone else. You can't buy property and live off the land or off the grid.
You either get a job and pay taxes and participate in the economy, or else they will seize your property and someone else who wants to pay property taxes will get it.
You can choose to heat your own home with electricity, natural gas, propane (guess what, if you filled your propane tank last month, you didn't pay "surge" pricing), wood, etc, etc.
Or just turn down the thermostat, put on more clothes, chop some wood, do some jumping jacks, etc.
You can't buy property and live off the land or off the grid.
WTF? Really?
A large number of preppers would like a word with you...
It's a socialist game to act like you didn't have any choices and someone else should be responsible to take care of you.
I do agree that we should remove more regulation, allowing people more choice, but I don't currently believe it would have changed much here.
A $17k electric bill sucks, but that's what happens when you hit record energy pricing and make absolutely no accommodation in your consumption. Personal responsibility is a thing.
Any attempt to soften this blow, without holding the consumers responsible, will WEAKEN our ability to weather a crisis like this in the future.
There is at least one major way that government interference made this worse.
What portion of generation capacity investment do you think went toward wind and solar over the last decade?
I don't know the answer, but I know it's absurdly high, that the misallocation of resources was created by artificial government subsidies, and that those investments didn't help us here.
That is a newsworthy point to make.
If it wasn't so politically incorrect to talk about coal generation... Maybe the investment we've already made would have carried us through this crisis much more smoothly...
But think about it like this:
The crunch in energy prices was largely in natural gas (which is the primary backup to wind and solar). We can produce only so much gas per day, without time to build out more capacity (rework or drill wells). So, for the most part, in a short term crisis, we have a given amount of gas produced in the country.
When we hit record low temps across most of the country for an extended period...
We outran our ability to produce.
So, everyone in the country is now bidding on a limited supply of BTUs. As the price rises, we should naturally reduce our consumption, lessening the crisis.
People who were paying to run their outdoor sauna might turn it off. Great! There's gas saved to help keep grandma defrosted!
If someone is heating an uninsulated barn because they like to sit out there and paint watercolors, and they leave it running through this... they should pay $17k!
They denied that heating capacity to someone's grandma!
If they paid to heat the same barn, not for a frivolous reason, but, say they had $200k of seedlings that have to be kept warm, they still made an economic decision, and should be held to that.
I understand feeling blindsided by a dramatically higher electric or gas bill. That sucks, and it's not normally something we have to pay a whole lot of attention to.
But that's how a free market works, and I know the radio and television morons were actually warning people to reduce their consumption. They sometimes do spread important messages.
PS- I don't believe anyone with a reasonable sized home, running reasonable insulation, and keeping their thermostat set at a reasonable temp got a $17k bill.
It's just not believable (unless the billing is just wrong).
Something else is going on here. Grow op, something.
Take a look at that shithead fucking energy policy in CA. All thier infrastructure costs went into green policy.
They didn't give a F about maintaining the infrastructure they had. Now look at the place. They literally burned an entire city (Paradise, CA) to the ground two years ago because of a transformer problem .
The power company manipulated the price so it was no longer arms length. You can't shut off your power generation then say the increased prices were spot
In retrospect, my phrasing was not as precise as it should've been. They made the decisions that caused their power to be cut off, then billed the client for their mistake
This is like our hospitals charging 300 bucks for an aspirin.
You can try to enslave someone for 30 years of payments for one month of electricity, but everyone has a breaking point. If it were me-- I just wouldn't pay. There are people who would react in a less reasonable manner.
Charging $300 for aspirin is unconscionable because
the aspirin cost $.25
the hospital is actively preventing you from using alternatives
Neither of those apply here.
The fuel costs were astronomically higher due to the demand... They're just passing that cost on to you, exactly as the contract stipulates.
The power company can't stop you from using wood, propane, or a gas powered generator to heat your home.
There is some fuckery in that there are very few places in the country where you can choose from more than one electric provider, but no one could generate cheap power with gas prices as they are.
Nobody is going to pay that. It's the equivalent of charging someone a million dollars for a glass of water in the desert.
There is no legitimate business transaction here where one side is forced to agree to exorbitant fees for electricity when the only other option is dying with your family.
I foresee this being overturned either voluntarily or via the courts.
The power companies didn't do anything nefarious.
The coldest weather on record created the highest power demand on record, which created the greatest natural gas demand on record.
A free market, operating normally, would expect to see record natural gas prices at the same time. This isn't some scheme to defraud Texans. This is how a free market works.
If you want to protect yourself against price surges like that, the free market allows you to do so. Hedges on critical commodities are a thing for a reason. You just have to prepare before the emergency.
Texans took care of one another, largely without government interference.
That's MAGA af.
Don't cry like a simp because the free market operated properly.
If government regs made it worse, then you should be pissed.
We don't need any of this "boo hoo hoo, everyone in the country needed to stay warm all at once, and I had to compete with others for the limited supply of natural gas".
That's how it works, and reality doesn't care about your feelings. GTFO with that socialist BS.
Charging someone $17k for survival is NOT maga as fuck. It's is the most oligarchy Democrat big brother, government backed theivevery bullshit I have ever seen.
Maga is making america great, not fucking people over and enslaving them with debt.
There is NO free market for energy. Everyone who sells it does so on behalf of the government with their consent.
You can't buy it from someone else. You can't buy property and live off the land or off the grid.
You either get a job and pay taxes and participate in the economy, or else they will seize your property and someone else who wants to pay property taxes will get it.
Not true, brother.
You can choose to heat your own home with electricity, natural gas, propane (guess what, if you filled your propane tank last month, you didn't pay "surge" pricing), wood, etc, etc.
Or just turn down the thermostat, put on more clothes, chop some wood, do some jumping jacks, etc.
WTF? Really?
A large number of preppers would like a word with you...
It's a socialist game to act like you didn't have any choices and someone else should be responsible to take care of you.
I do agree that we should remove more regulation, allowing people more choice, but I don't currently believe it would have changed much here.
A $17k electric bill sucks, but that's what happens when you hit record energy pricing and make absolutely no accommodation in your consumption. Personal responsibility is a thing.
Any attempt to soften this blow, without holding the consumers responsible, will WEAKEN our ability to weather a crisis like this in the future.
Quit with the emotional arguments!
There is at least one major way that government interference made this worse.
What portion of generation capacity investment do you think went toward wind and solar over the last decade?
I don't know the answer, but I know it's absurdly high, that the misallocation of resources was created by artificial government subsidies, and that those investments didn't help us here.
That is a newsworthy point to make.
If it wasn't so politically incorrect to talk about coal generation... Maybe the investment we've already made would have carried us through this crisis much more smoothly...
But think about it like this:
The crunch in energy prices was largely in natural gas (which is the primary backup to wind and solar). We can produce only so much gas per day, without time to build out more capacity (rework or drill wells). So, for the most part, in a short term crisis, we have a given amount of gas produced in the country.
When we hit record low temps across most of the country for an extended period...
We outran our ability to produce.
So, everyone in the country is now bidding on a limited supply of BTUs. As the price rises, we should naturally reduce our consumption, lessening the crisis.
People who were paying to run their outdoor sauna might turn it off. Great! There's gas saved to help keep grandma defrosted!
If someone is heating an uninsulated barn because they like to sit out there and paint watercolors, and they leave it running through this... they should pay $17k!
They denied that heating capacity to someone's grandma!
If they paid to heat the same barn, not for a frivolous reason, but, say they had $200k of seedlings that have to be kept warm, they still made an economic decision, and should be held to that.
I understand feeling blindsided by a dramatically higher electric or gas bill. That sucks, and it's not normally something we have to pay a whole lot of attention to.
But that's how a free market works, and I know the radio and television morons were actually warning people to reduce their consumption. They sometimes do spread important messages.
PS- I don't believe anyone with a reasonable sized home, running reasonable insulation, and keeping their thermostat set at a reasonable temp got a $17k bill.
It's just not believable (unless the billing is just wrong).
Something else is going on here. Grow op, something.
you're absolutely correct.
Take a look at that shithead fucking energy policy in CA. All thier infrastructure costs went into green policy.
They didn't give a F about maintaining the infrastructure they had. Now look at the place. They literally burned an entire city (Paradise, CA) to the ground two years ago because of a transformer problem .
The power company manipulated the price so it was no longer arms length. You can't shut off your power generation then say the increased prices were spot
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/cascend-data-shows-wind-power-was-chief-culprit-texas-grid-collapse
In retrospect, my phrasing was not as precise as it should've been. They made the decisions that caused their power to be cut off, then billed the client for their mistake
16000 a month.
Don't be stupid.
This is like our hospitals charging 300 bucks for an aspirin.
You can try to enslave someone for 30 years of payments for one month of electricity, but everyone has a breaking point. If it were me-- I just wouldn't pay. There are people who would react in a less reasonable manner.
Charging $300 for aspirin is unconscionable because
Neither of those apply here.
The fuel costs were astronomically higher due to the demand... They're just passing that cost on to you, exactly as the contract stipulates.
The power company can't stop you from using wood, propane, or a gas powered generator to heat your home.
There is some fuckery in that there are very few places in the country where you can choose from more than one electric provider, but no one could generate cheap power with gas prices as they are.
Sucks, but reality sometimes does.
Electricity costs .32 cents per kw/hr in ca at peak.
Your obviously a troll