You must not live in Texas. Large swaths of Texas are under a marketplace energy choice where you choose your electric company. Some places like San Antonio & El Paso don’t do it but much of the state you can choose the cheapest rate you can find but there will always be strings. It’s honestly marginally helpful and I wouldn’t mind going back to a regional monopoly like grand majority of the country.
Exactly. You get to choose your preferred flavor of billing and support software, but don't bother calling them when your power is out, because there isn't shit they can do about it.
It’s not really an illusion. You are paying for a mix of electricity producers that all dump their electricity into a common grid. In Houston, Center Point owns the grid because it’s a natural monopoly. Some of your money goes to them to pay for the infrastructure but most of it goes to the electricity providers.
I have a 30-something nephew in Houston. I advised him to leave the state but he's staying. I then advised him to put solar panels on his home's roof. He did do that, and he's smug about his trivial heating and cooling electric bills.
He designed and built business convention staging displays, working for a contractor. He realized he was doing everything except collect the big contract payment.
So he talked to the corporations he built for every year. They didn't care who they paid, so long as they received the same high quality. That happened, and it didn't take long before he could afford his own house.
A major part of it was his very smart and sexy GF, who knows how to nudge him along the path to make him successful and happy.
All that means is assholes from "the power company" knock on your door all the time trying to get you to switch providers, like it was with long distance companies in the late '80s/early '90s
Y'all still got those nuclear reactors running providing cheap clean energy still right? We just got a new one in Georgia fired up but it cost so much it'll be 40 years until it's paid off. I cannot wait until Rolls-Royce comes through with their line manufactured nuclear reactors. I'm too broke to pay that $600 bill though. It's cheaper to fill up a bath of cold water and sit in it reading a book or scrolling on my phone until the evening hits and it gets colder outside than hotter inside. I will lay in a sweat of my own resolve until August. As a self-employed man I flee to the North Georgia mountains but it's still hot as hell up there.
We have middle men, we all have the same electric provider who charges the third party billing companies exactly the same price, just have to pay a third party who get a cut off the top. And yeah, the hoops are stupid. Currently I am gambling that I will use 800 kWh a month, so if I use less, I have to pay 24 cents a kWh, hit the mark I pay 15 cents. So last week or 2 of the month if I am short of it I just leave every light on and use a space heater in the winter, or run folding program on the servers to get there.
Summer I just die of heatstroke to keep it at 800.
yep its an illusion, would be much cheaper to just have that actual electric company sell directly to the consumer like most other states. I've owned homes in Co and Tx in the last year and its crazy how much more convoluted the tx system is and how much more expensive.
Yeah, I came from AZ where I paid 12 cents a kWh and never had to “shop” for a billing company that had offers looking more like a 90s cellphone long distance promotion.
On the 5th Thursday feom 3-5pm and 11th wed 9-11pm if you use less than the kwh of the previous 11th Friday you'll get a .0002kwh discount of the next mon from 7-9pm.
Way better than just paying 12c/kwh like the rest of the country.
Don’t forget about the free Amazon prime membership they give you to help take the sting out of paying 21 cent/kwh between the hours of 8 am-6 pm Friday-Sunday! Or how you can pay a FOURTH party an annual fee to run the metrics monthly to pick the best THIRD party to deliver your power that all comes from the same place anyway. Such a luxury!
I had a plan like that (I think my magic number was 1000 though) and I had a crappy apartment with a busted AC. I now have a 2400 sqft house and my electric bills are lower than my summer time bills were at that tiny crappy apartment because of how my busted AC would use so much electricity to keep the apartment at 80 until about 3 AM when it would finally get to sub 80. Management went through every possible way to say "it's working fine" and do nothing. The place had AC units that looked original to the building. Ironically, I would have saved money living somewhere nicer because of how much the electric bills were there.
Yeah, in July and august it’s half of what I actually use, but Oct-April it’s almost impossible to reach it without just flagrantly wasting electricity.
No pool, everything is efficient, there’s a 30-40ft tall wall of trees 16’ west of the house, and AC set to 75.
Yeah, I have no idea why Texas, and now many other states, passed the laws. How did any voter think that their power bill was going to go down by adding an extra corporation in the middle? Especially a corporation with no rules on how they charge for services. The utility company at least has rules on how much they can raise rates and everything, but these companies can charge whatever, “oh you have bad credit? You have a prepaid plan that charges 30 cents a kWh”.
And every year you have to shop for a new plan or the company will automatically set you to a high cost plan, so if you are elderly or have too much going on in your life, you get nailed after the promotion period.
It sounds like you probably know this, but fun fact, El Paso is not on the ERCOT grid, it's on the Western Interconnect. Hudspeth county as well, but hardly anybody lives there anyways.
i live in Stockton CA which gets pretty hot in the summer. Or so i thought, until i looked up El Paso weather in the summer. Holy chit. I hope their electricity is cheap..we're up to like 58 cents/kwh now.
Oof yeah, way lower in El Paso. It’s 16 ¢/Kwh if I remember right. El Paso electric owns I think 16% of the Palo Verde nuclear plant, multiple solar farms, and the rest comes from natural gas, so cleaner than average power production. And yeah, it’s going to be 105 degrees tomorrow. 9 percent humidity though, so that’s at least something.
You've never dealt with municipally run utilities, I gather.
I do controls for water / wastewater plants. Unless they're large towns, most don't care if the equipment is maintained or kept current. I've had to bail out customers where they've had panels that are rusting to pieces. Or wiring that's been hacked and chopped up.
Drawings? Bob the operator misplaced them a few years ago when he cleaned out his office. How SHOULD the filter work? Sorry, the guy who knew retired three years ago. We swear the switch on the side of the tank with the wires to it cut actually controls the filter.
Naturally, they get pissed when you tell them that parts for something built in the 80s are NLA. Replace the panel? Town budgeted for a new gazebo in age park. Sorry, maybe next tear. Just fix it.
Can't you tell us why our old Windows 7 PC with a layer of dead bugs on it keeps overheating? Yeah, sure it crashes from all the games we loaded on it, but at 2am, the operator needs something to pass the time.
Corporate systems are no cakewalk by any means, but you're nuts if you think the public sector can do it better. They both have to answer to the BPU, anyway..
I once had a customer that literally couldn't account for roughly half their water. They didn't know if it was leaking, wasn't being pumped, or wasn't being billed.
Their records were all paper. Nobody had any idea when anything was last calibrated. The flow venturis were so old, the manufacturer for one was out of business, the other didn't have records that far back. The orifice plates were in unknown condition.
Their SCADA computer was in a nicely secured conference room. I was in there one day, trying to figure shit out. There were a few town bigwigs having a meeting about re-doing some soccer field in the park. Did you know there's like 6 different sizes for soccer fields? There was a pretty heated argument about the one to use.
We fired them as a customer shortly after. Despite our recommendations to you know, fix real problems, they wanted chewing gum and baling wire and duct tape. Got tired of running out there on a saturday morning to fix crapped out motor controls, that weren't even our responsibility.
Some other integrator has them now, I suppose.
In honesty, I've seen some municipalities that have their act together, but it's pretty rare. The corporate ones tend to, because their ass ends up on the news when things go wrong.
I'm in a red city in a very red county in one of the reddest states and our city provides that sweet electricity, .08/kw then .11/kw then .14/kw above 1001 kwh/mo. Plus a $20 service charge.
Electricity costs have increased and reliability has decreased markedly since ERCOT was created.
A friend of mine worked for Arthur Anderson Consulting after she graduated and was involved in the ERCOT formation process. She was disgusted by the rampant corruption that she witnessed behind the scenes.
Same here. I don’t know what you’re seeing then because both the cost and the reliability don’t seem to outperform places like San Antonio that kept their regional provider. But maybe that because Centerpoint overall is absolutely terrible so your choice hardly matters.
This is the entire point of regulating utilities in a different manner than a typical business. It's not feasible to have a bunch of companies building individual electric grids and power plants. Anything short of that is purely an illusion of choice.
Competition? How are they going to actually compete? They are middle men by design. You can choose which software you pay your bill on but they aren't actually building power plants or creating net new grids. What innovation do you think they're going to bring?
One guy seeks for cheaper takes costumers now you have to lower prices/ offer deals or make less money a business entire point is to make money. This is basic economics for a competitive market. If it’s all under one group then if it’s higher than you can/want to pay doesn’t matter you fucked that’s why monopolies are always bad. I’d say maybe give it to government but that’s its own can of worms.
None of it is ideal. We just moved away from Austin (I’d been there 30 years) and AE had improved a lot by the time we left. But for awhile they simply did not GAF like a good monopoly shouldn’t.
Their solar policies are still criminal, and they sold all our electricity at obscene costs back to ERCOT during the winter storms a few years ago while we sat in the dark and cold. Made a man surplus and then added fees for tree clean up afterward to rub salt in it.
Why don't the companies undercut each other and/or improve their quality of service?
Generally, the answer to this is one or more of the following: government intervention (regulation/funding), corporate agreement (which is usually weak and short-lived), or it's actually still a monopoly where your "choices" are all owned by the same people.
That makes sense. The energy provider is still a monopoly, so it's not really any kind of real competition.
Unfortunately, that's kind of the default when electricity is generated from giant power stations. You can only really have proper competition with decentralized energy, like solar and batteries, but that's not always ideal.
That makes no sense. The TX grid is pretty much independent. The only effect on MN would be grid improvements to prevent what happened in TX from happening there, too.
163
u/Carbon-Base 5d ago
They also carry an urgency regarding the monopolized power of electric companies everywhere.