this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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The one state that refuses to connect to the interstate power grid and has Uber-like surge pricing on electricity? Yeah, I'm sure this won't result in regular people footing the bill for more billionaire profits.
Texas is a joke, but not a good one.
Texas pays 11 dollars per kilowatt hour. Far lower than left wing states and has a manufacturing base. The market grid bids down prices for the right to sell electricity. That is one major reason companies move to Texas. Louisiana and Oklahoma, and states may be cheaper, but they don't have a manufacturing base.
Every Texan I know has a generator to deal with the unreliability of the grid, and there's never been an article about someone in Iowa getting a surprise $100k electric bill...and the average wage in Texas is substantially lower than in "left wing" states like California or Washington...so not sure you're making an apples-to-apples comparison, but time will be the judge, we can all check-in in a year and see how this plays out. Does Lemmy have a remind me! bot?
Texan here. I don't have a generator. Blackouts basically haven't been a thing in my area since like 15 years ago, so it really depends on location. Also my electric bill works the same way as it would in any other state; the problem is when people buy electricity at what you might call "market price": most of the time it's cheaper, but you get fucked over sooner or later. It's kind of like that story about people's AC being controlled by the power company. They signed up for a program that explicitly set your AC higher during high-demand periods and then surprise Pikachu faced when the company did what they said they would do.
That said, our grid is still definitely trash (as are many other things here) and I'm desperately trying to move. Basically the only thing we've got going for us is the food is amazing.
If the price swing between peak and off-peak is dramatic enough, I guess one could probably cool water during off-peak hours and then use a heat exchanger or something to use it to sink heat during peak hours.
https://home.howstuffworks.com/ac4.htm
That's not intended to store energy, just transport it, but I'd imagine that all one would really need is that plus a sufficiently-large, insulated tank of water.