‘Things are going to break’: Texas power plants are running nonstop
Does anyone in Texas know if there have been any changes since the 2021 spring freezes to the system in terms of letting people set their own price caps, preferably with some fine grained options to them? My recollection from then is that one issue is a lot of people had signed up for completely dynamic price plans, where they got the absolute lowest grid price at all times, but that the system didn&#x27;t let them easily and adjustable do caps. Kind of similar to some of the surprise cloud services bills that appear on HN from time to time for that matter, anything of that kind should have some sort of sanity check to &quot;never ever spend more than $X without my explicit say so&quot;. Ideally a market system like that would allow entering something automated along the lines of<p>&gt;<i>I will pay up to $0.10&#x2F;kWh with no limits, $0.10-$0.25&#x2F;kWh but only for 6 hours per day, or &gt;$0.25 kWh but only for up to $5 worth per day and it should send alerts to my phone&#x2F;email&#x2F;app immediately</i><p>Then there&#x27;d be no surprise hundred&#x2F;thousand dollar bills, and the grid operator could get demand to smoothly drop off based on how much people valued it just by raising the price. Could even make that revenue neutral by having all excess money gathered from emergency demand adjustment pricing be evenly distributed back to all customers at the end of each billing cycle, which would help offset the loss for those less well off. It&#x27;d be more transparent to see the value of things like home energy storage or conservation measures.<p>Or maybe those plans just fell out of favor vs more traditional uniform billing where both the best and the worst case are price capped?