~~ Two related articles posted for dmorista ~~
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/02/20/trhe-f20.html
Texans receive exorbitant electricity bills after winter storm ~~ Trévon Austin
In the aftermath of the winter storm which left millions of people in Texas without access to power and clean water, some residents are receiving costly electricity bills.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which oversees approximately 90 percent of the electric load in the state, was wholly unprepared for the record demand for power in the past week as temperatures fell well below freezing.
The combination of insufficient capacity and the temperature-induced crippling of power stations led to a complete collapse of the power grid. As power plants and natural gas pipelines froze, the market price of electrical power in Texas soared from a seasonal average of $50 to $9,000 per Megawatt.
Texans on variable rate electricity plans have seen electricity bills for tens of thousands of dollars. According to KHOU 11, Dallas resident Ty Williams owes more than $17,000 for his house, guest home and office.
Williams had a variable-rate plan with energy supplier Griddy, which encouraged its customers to temporarily switch energy providers to avoid high prices. He stated that no company would take him until February 26, leaving him on the hook for thousands of dollars.
Griddy customers pay a monthly fee of $9.99 and then pay for the spot cost of the energy at the time of day which it is used, allowing for the skyrocketing of bills this week.
“How in the world can anyone pay that? I mean, you go from a couple hundred dollars a month … there’s absolutely no way‚ it makes no sense,” Williams said.
KHOU 11 also cited a customer who had a bill of over $1,000 for her 700-square foot apartment. Another couple tweeted a picture of a bill for over $3,800, noting, “Using as little as possible 1,300 sq. ft. house and this is my bill. How is this fair. I only paid $1200 for the whole 2020.”
Roy Pierce, who lives in the Dallas suburb of Willow Park, told NBC that his electricity bill was $10,000 for his three-bedroom home.
“We are hoping there will be relief,” Royce said. “This is something maybe we can skate by and tackle as time goes on, but how many people can’t? A lot.”
Customers of other companies have also seen their bills increase during the winter storm. Veronica Garcia, a resident in Mansfield, who gets her power from Reliant Energy, said that her bill is projected to be twice as much as she usually pays for power in a month. Garcia paid $63 for electricity usage in January but expects a bill between $114 and $133 for this month.
The Texas government, infamous for its deregulation policies and privatization of public services, has not indicated if it will intervene on behalf of customers. According to legal experts, state law prohibits companies from exploiting natural disasters for profit. However, it is unclear if such legal protections can be extended to customers with hefty electricity bills.
========================================
His Lights Stayed on During Texas’ Storm. Now He Owes
$16,752. ~~ Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Ivan Penn
Published Feb. 20, 2021 Updated Feb. 21, 2021
10-12 minutes
After a public outcry from people like Scott Willoughby, whose exorbitant electric bill is soon due, Gov. Greg Abbott said lawmakers should ensure Texans “do not get stuck with
skyrocketing energy bills” caused by the storm.
Texas Governor Promises to Address Skyrocketing Electric Bills
Gov. Greg Abbott said on Sunday that legislators were working to provide relief for
residents facing high energy bills after a devastating winter storm.
Texans who have suffered through days of freezing cold without power should not be
subjected to skyrocketing energy bills due to an due to a spike in the energy market. So,
I held an emergency meeting yesterday with legislative leaders to begin the legislative
process to shield Texas families from unreasonable bills. This is something that is being
fast tracked that legislators are working on as we speak at this moment in time, right
now. We will have meetings this week to get to the bottom of this, but also to provide
relief and support to our fellow Texans. One thing that we had during that meeting, it was
very productive in the sense that it was a bipartisan meeting. And Senator Royce West
in particular pointed out we need to put partisan issues aside, work collaboratively
together, to deliver solutions for our fellow Texans. Along those lines, as we were
speaking, there’s a meeting being held by the Texas Public Utilities Commission
announcing this relief. The Texas public Utilities Commission called an emergency
meeting today to issue a moratorium on customer disconnections for nonpayment. They
are also going to restrict electric providers from sending customer invoices at this time,
and this pause will give them time to address the electric and power billing challenges
that Texans are seeing.
Gov. Greg Abbott said on Sunday that legislators were working to provide relief for residents
facing high energy bills after a devastating winter storm.CreditCredit...Tamir Kalifa for The
New York Times
Published Feb. 20, 2021Updated Feb. 21, 2021, 6:16 p.m. ET
SAN ANTONIO — As millions of Texans shivered in dark, cold homes over the past week
while a winter storm devastated the state’s power grid and froze natural gas production, those
who could still summon lights with the flick of a switch felt lucky.
Now, many of them are paying a severe price for it.
“My savings is gone,” said Scott Willoughby, a 63-year-old Army veteran who lives on Social
Security payments in a Dallas suburb. He said he had nearly emptied his savings account so
that he would be able to pay the $16,752 electric bill charged to his credit card — 70 times
what he usually pays for all of his utilities combined. “There’s nothing I can do about it, but it’s
broken me.”
Mr. Willoughby is among scores of Texans who have reported skyrocketing electric bills as the
price of keeping lights on and refrigerators humming shot upward. For customers whose
electricity prices are not fixed and are instead tied to the fluctuating wholesale price, the
spikes have been astronomical.
The outcry elicited angry calls for action from lawmakers from both parties and prompted Gov.
Greg Abbott, a Republican, to hold an emergency meeting with legislators on Saturday to
discuss the enormous bills.
“We have a responsibility to protect Texans from spikes in their energy bills that are a result of
the severe winter weather and power outages,” Mr. Abbott, who has been reeling after the
state’s infrastructure failure, said in a statement after the meeting. He added that Democrats
and Republicans would work together to make sure people “do not get stuck with
skyrocketing energy bills.”
The electric bills are coming due at the end of a week in which Texans have faced a
combination of crises caused by the frigid weather, beginning on Monday, when power grid
failures and surging demand led to millions being left without electricity.
Natural gas producers were not prepared for the freeze either, and many people’s homes
were cut off from heat. Now, millions of people are discovering that they have no safe water
because of burst pipes, frozen wells or water treatment plants that have been knocked offline.
Power has returned in recent days for all but about 60,000 Texans as the storm moved east,
where it has also caused power outages in Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia and Ohio.
The steep electric bills in Texas are in part a result of the state’s uniquely unregulated energy
market, which allows customers to pick their electricity providers among about 220 retailers in
an entirely market-driven system.
Under some of the plans, when demand increases, prices rise. The goal, architects of the
system say, is to balance the market by encouraging consumers to reduce their usage and
power suppliers to create more electricity.
But when last week’s crisis hit and power systems faltered, the state’s Public Utilities
Commission ordered that the price cap be raised to its maximum limit of $9 per kilowatt-hour,
easily pushing many customers’ daily electric costs above $100. And in some cases, like Mr.
Willoughby’s, bills rose by more than 50 times the normal cost.
Many of the people who have reported extremely high charges, including Mr. Willoughby, are
customers of Griddy, a small company in Houston that provides electricity at wholesale prices,
which can quickly change based on supply and demand.
The company passes the wholesale price directly to customers, charging an additional $9.99
monthly fee. Much of the time, the rate is considered affordable. But the model can be risky:
Last week, foreseeing a huge jump in wholesale prices, the company encouraged all of its
customers — about 29,000 people — to switch to another provider when the storm arrived.
But many were unable to do so.
Katrina Tanner, a Griddy customer who lives in Nevada, Texas, said she had been charged
$6,200 already this month, more than five times what she paid in all of 2020. She began using
Griddy at a friend’s suggestion a couple of years ago and was pleased at the time with how
simple it was to sign up.
As the storm rolled through during the past week, however, she kept opening the company’s
app on her phone and seeing her bill “just rising, rising, rising,” Ms. Tanner said. Griddy was
able to take the money she owed directly from her bank account, and she now has just $200
left. She suspects that she was only able to keep that much because her bank stopped
Griddy from taking more.
Some lawmakers and consumer advocates said the price spikes had made it clear that
customers did not understand the complicated terms of the company’s model.
“To the Texas Utilities Commission: What are you thinking, allowing the average type of
household to sign up for this kind of program?” Tyson Slocum, the director of the energy
program at Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, said of Griddy. “The risk-reward is so
out of whack that it never should have been permitted in the first place.”
Phil King, a Republican state lawmaker who represents an area west of Fort Worth, said
some of his constituents who were on variable-rate contracts were complaining about bills in
the thousands.
“When something like this happens, you’re in real trouble” with such contracts, Mr. King said.
“There have got to be some emergency financial waivers and other actions taken until we can
work through this and get to the bottom of it.”
Responding to its outraged customers, Griddy, too, appeared to try to shift anger to the Public
Utilities Commission in a statement .
“We intend to fight this for, and alongside, our customers for equity and accountability — to
reveal why such price increases were allowed to happen as millions of Texans went without
power,” the statement said.
William W. Hogan, considered the architect of the Texas energy market design, said in an
interview this past week that the high prices reflected the market performing as it was
designed.
The rapid losses of power — more than a third of the state’s available electricity production
was offline at one point — increased the risk that the entire system would collapse, causing
prices to rise, said Mr. Hogan, a professor of global energy policy at Harvard’s Kennedy
School.
“As you get closer and closer to the bare minimum, these prices get higher and higher, which
is what you want,” Mr. Hogan said.
Robert McCullough, an energy consultant in Portland, Ore., and a critic of Mr. Hogan’s, said
that allowing the market to drive energy policy with few protections for consumers was “idiotic”
and that similar actions had devastated retailers and consumers following the California
energy crisis of 2000 and 2001.
“The similar situation caused a wave of bankruptcies as retailers and customers discovered
that they were on the hook for bills 30 times their normal levels,” Mr. McCullough said. “We
are going to see this again.”
DeAndré Upshaw said his power had been on and off in his Dallas apartment throughout the
storm. A lot of his neighbors had it worse, so he felt fortunate to have electricity and heat,
inviting some neighbors over to warm up.
Then Mr. Upshaw, 33, saw that his utility bill from Griddy had risen to more than $6,700. He
usually pays about $80 a month this time of year.
He had been trying to conserve power as the storm raged on, but it didn’t seem to matter. He
also signed up to switch to another utility company, but he is still being charged until the
change goes into effect on Monday.
“It’s a utility — it’s something that you need to live,” Mr. Upshaw, 33, said. “I don’t feel like I’ve
used $6,700 of electricity in the last decade. That’s not a cost that any reasonable person
would have to pay for five days of intermittent electric service being used at the bare
minimum.”
As Texas slowly thaws out, Ms. Tanner is allowing herself a small luxury after days of keeping
the thermostat at 60 degrees.
“I finally decided the other day, if we were going to pay these high prices, we weren’t going to
freeze,” she said. “So I cranked it up to 65.”
Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio reported from San Antonio, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs from
New York and Ivan Penn from Los Angeles. Caitlin Cruz contributed reporting from Houston
and David Montgomery from Austin. Jack Begg contributed research.
No comments:
Post a Comment