How do Texas residents afford electricity during high-demand? - eviltoast

Whenever they have a spike in demand, the de-regulated prices go up by several hundred percent. Example

  • chaosmarine92@reddthat.com
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    4 months ago

    How do you keep up with the current price? Does your thermostat have a setting where if the price is above X then turn off? Do you just come home to a freezing house and say “oh the electric is too expensive, guess I’ll grab some wood”?

    • Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      I check sahko.tk in the evenings to see if it’s going to be particularly expensive the next day. This is mostly in the winter time, at summer I hardly pay any attention to it. They usually warn people in the news too for the handful of really expensive days in a year. Depending how high it gets I might turn off the heating for the peak hours but generally not because it doesn’t really make that of a big difference as the prices average out over a long period of time. Some people have automatic thermostats that turn off the heating after the electricity price passes a certain limit. My water heater for example is set to go on during the night when electricity is at its cheapest.

      • chaosmarine92@reddthat.com
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        4 months ago

        Are the predicted prices ever crazy far off from what they actually end up being like what happened in Texas last winter? Where am outage causes price to go from like 20c/khw to 2000c/khw over a one hour period?

          • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
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            4 months ago

            Seems like a pretty sane way to handle market pressures, rather than, “I hope nothing terrible happens and my bill is suddenly thousands of dollars.”