why frozen gas

[trader_4]

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

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.

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?

[trader_4]

Even if it's none of our business doesn't mean that it makes it OK or that we can't speak out and have empathy for those that were screwed. Many of us have basic human values and think it is our business to speak out when we see people being abused and ripped off.

[Ed Pawlowski]

I don't feel bad that they could not get help from the other grids, shame on them. But to allow a scenario where some poor working slob now has a $10,000 or $20,000 electric bill is unconscionable.

Look at the repercussions on a modest wage earner that suddenly has huge debt because the utility commissioners thought is was ok. What does it do to their kids?

Seriously, are you that big of a prick to just say "tough, deal with it"

Double? Triple? Sure. Thousand times? No.

[invalid unparseable]

There were tanks at the heads of all the gas wells I had seen in PA. Crews would come in weekly or so to pump out these tanks which I assume contained water and higher molecular weight hydrocarbons.

[Jim Joyce]

My friends in Round Rock, a suburb of Austin, told me they were directed to

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.

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.

It's the Texas way. Figure out the right thing to do, then do something else.

[angelica...]

Why would you expect the "fine print" to be at

The fine print is in the contract that one signs with the provider.

I see that comparepower.com gets paid by the utilities for referring customers to them. That makes the utilities their customers and consumers are their product.

Cindy Hamilton

[Ed Pawlowski]

Electric was deregulated in CT a few years back. It was, in the end, just a way of letting a few people make money. The first year I was able to save a whopping $5 a month by going to a different supplier. Then the offerings started to creep up and exceed the utility rate that I eventually went back to. Sign with me and get 3 months at this incredible low rate! They keep the KY handy for the next bill though.

[trader_4]

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.

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.

+1

[Clare Snyder]

Wouldn't be so bad if they DID keep the KY available - they just spit on you and drive it in!

[Ralph Mowery]

Seems that just about everything has too much small print to go with the big print. About 15 years ago I bought a house that was about 20 years old. The real estate agent wanted me to get a home warrenty. After I looked it over I could not see that it covered very much and a few years of payments would cover what it did pay.

A few years ago my wife was in the hospital and when she came home I got a call about a few things such as the meals. If she was alone, it would have helped, but I can do the basic cooking so we declined it. They did sent a physical therists out 2 time a week for several weeks to help her learn how to walk around and do exercises to help her.

Been trying to find out how much the Direct, Dish and Cable systems cost after the large print, but even after looking it over, I still can not tell, but I am not wasting lots of time trying to.