On Thursday, March 4, 2021 at 4:00:35 AM UTC-5, Jim Joyce wrote:
On Wed, 3 Mar 2021 06:51:03 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote:
On Tuesday, March 2, 2021 at 4:31:56 PM UTC-5, Ralph Mowery wrote:
In article , says...
They could have got their electricity from a conventional utility if
they wanted a safe contract.

This is far beyond not safe. I'm sure many of these people knew there
was a risk but there is no justification for $100 bills becoming $10,000
with little or no notice. None. Totally immoral.

Show me where this has happened and where it would be considered "normal
risk" or even a high risk.


If the rates had gone up maybe 5 times it would not be too bad, but for
electricity to jump 100 times without warning is just not right.

Agree. And keep in mind, if it went up 5x for a few days, it would still not
have a huge impact on your bill for a month. If you had a $100 monthly
bill, that's $3 a day. If it went up 5x, that would be $15 a day for three days.
Let;s say that because of the cold weather, your usage went up 5x too.
That would be $75 a day for three days or $225. So you'd have a monthly
bill of ~$325. But they are getting bills for $10K, $16k



AS mentioned, I do not know anything about the TX system. Are there
several kinds of options such as paying a flat rate per KWH or like the
natural gas where you can take out contrct to pay so much per unit at a
certain time frame ?

It sounds like they have an arrangement like we do here in NJ. Our bills
come from the utility, JCPL, that has been the power company forever.
But the bill is in two parts, a charge for generation and a charge for delivery.
For generation JCPL used to be the only choice. Then maybe in the
90s regulators changed the scheme so that you could choose either JCPL
or other suppliers for the generation. Several companies started sending
mailings, offering you the option to switch to them for lower cost. I looked
at it a few times. Their energy costs were a little lower, but not enough
that it made a substantial difference. The rate here now is about 13 cents,
that's total, about half for delivery, half for the generation. So if JCPl was
at 6.5 cents for the generation, these other suppliers might have been at
5.5 cents. So your total cost would be 12 cents instead of 13, which isn't
much. I never switched because of concerns that it was only a small gain,
could go the other way, etc. But I can see some elderly living on SS where
$5 a month is significant to them and they switch. And the typical marketing
offer says something like save ten to fifteen percent on your energy costs.
People see that, don't realize that the energy cost is only half their bill,
so they think their $100 bill will go down to $85 or $90. In reality it would
go to $92 to $95, assuming the energy was cheaper and stayed there.
Those were the kinds of numbers I saw and decided it wasn't worth it.
My friends in Round Rock, a suburb of Austin, told me they were directed to
https://www.comparepower.com when power deregulation came to their area.

I went there just now and entered 78664 as the Zip Code, which is one of
the Round Rock Zip Codes. At a casual glance, they don't seem to make it
easy to see which of the 66 available plans are primarily based on passing
the wholesale spot price directly to the consumer. I see things like free
nights and weekends, but no bold text that says your cost could increase by
10,000% on a day to day basis. I assume it's in there somewhere but I can
see why people would bail out of the fine print before getting thru it all.

Exactly. I was looking at Medicare Advantage plans online. Joe Namath
is on TV hawking them. One of the selling points is that they provide for
free meals at home and dental coverage. None of the plans I looked at
disclosed what the free meals were all about. And I'm talking about looking
at the plan details online, which are like 12 page summaries. You have to
download the "evidence of coverage" PDF sort through it to find it. I wasn't
looking for the meal thing, but happened to stumble upon in in that 70 page
document. Turns out the free meals is two meals a day for a week if you
come home from the hospital and need it. That's not a bad benefit, but it's
not fairly presented on TV and not in the 12 page plan details either.

Dental, there is some major shystering going on. I found an Aetna plan that
unlike the others, covers restorations and extractions. They sure point that
out in the 12 page summary. Again you have to download the EOC PDF
go look there to find that dental is capped at $250 a year. Meanwhile other
plans cover 50% of dental, capped at $2000 and do present it upfront.



I lived in a suburb of San Antonio and we didn't have deregulation there.
According to the comparepower.com site, they still don't have it there.
Many of my friends from there have told me they lost power and suffered
frozen pipes, but at least they didn't see $10k-$17k electric bills.

Hopefully they didn't suffer damage from the pipes. On TV they were showing
people with houses flooded. Obviously those folks didn't have some basic
knowledge. I would have hoped that the TX govt would have put out a message
warning people, telling them that if they think they have water pipes anywhere
that could freeze, they should turn off the water, open all faucets, etc.
But knowing TX, maybe the governor was too busy appearing on Fox to blame
windmills and working on removing all mask requirements, all capacity limits,
so that Covid can kill more people. And I'm sure Fretwell will weigh in and say
that it's just the people;s own faults, no need for govt to do anything. to warn
them.




It is often possible that many do not read or know how to read the fine
print in many contracts. Just as I have been trying to find out how
much cable and direct TV is. They show big numbers whre you can seen
them, then at the bottom of the page it usually just says 'for 6
months' or whatever but no price after that.

Yes and there should be some regulations that prevent what happened in TX.
I see the chowder head GOP governor just removed the requirement to wear
masks for the whole state. More brilliance, how many people will die from that?
It's the Texas way. Figure out the right thing to do, then do something
else.

+1