SNOW!!! v. ARRRRRGGGG!!!

[kirksnosehair]

 

[El Barto]

Looking back, I've owned two Toyotas (cellica and cresida), an RX7, a 280Z, a Honda (accord), and three generations of BMW 3er. I don't know as any of them were FWD. While I still think that FWD is an abomination of nature, damn, those things sure do live for snow and ice. Had to borrow one to get back home, and driving a car that won't launch ass-first when things get hairy gives you a wonderful sense of invincibility.

Power's finally back on, but now the water is off. Burst pipe somewhere, but thankfully it doesn't seem to be an inside problem.

[Stadler]

Looking back, I've owned two Toyotas (cellica and cresida), an RX7, a 280Z, a Honda (accord), and three generations of BMW 3er. I don't know as any of them were FWD. While I still think that FWD is an abomination of nature, damn, those things sure do live for snow and ice. Had to borrow one to get back home, and driving a car that won't launch ass-first when things get hairy gives you a wonderful sense of invincibility.

Power's finally back on, but now the water is off. Burst pipe somewhere, but thankfully it doesn't seem to be an inside problem.

I can't speak to the Accord or the Toyotas, but the RX7, the Z-car and the BMWs weren't likely FWD.  The best you'd get was the xDrive (all wheel drive) which is an on-demand system and is pretty good (not as good as the Subaru, though).  Yeah, you feel invincible, but there's something to that pucker feeling when the back end shoots out to the side!   

[Phoenix87x]

I'm over snow

Could barely get to work yesterday. First it was fluffy snow, but quickly turned to freezing rain and sleet. I've got FWD, but still it was a hot mess.

And then getting home last night and trying to shovel that thick, heavy, solid crap was no fun 

[cramx3]

I'm over snow

+1, another solid shovel session yesterday, and there might be another one by the time I get home from work today

[ProfessorPeart]

Man, seeing these stories out of Texas of people that get their electricity through this company called Griddy, they got bent over. Essentially, if you had them as the provider and didn't lose power, you get a nice bill for thousands of dollars. A retiree got a bill for over $16,000. Another lady said the company drained her bank account dry. The only thing that stopped them was the bank cutting them off when she hit $200.

My town locks us all in with an energy provider at a locked in rate every year. We have the option to do our own thing, but they always get us a really good deal. I pay $0.06595 per kWh. These Griddy people got jacked up to $9.99 per kWh! My most recent bill would have been over $7,000 at that rate.

My bill says the average temp for the billing cycle was 20 F. My bill is $94. Seeing these stories is just baffling to me.

[El Barto]

Man, seeing these stories out of Texas of people that get their electricity through this company called Griddy, they got bent over. Essentially, if you had them as the provider and didn't lose power, you get a nice bill for thousands of dollars. A retiree got a bill for over $16,000. Another lady said the company drained her bank account dry. The only thing that stopped them was the bank cutting them off when she hit $200.

My town locks us all in with an energy provider at a locked in rate every year. We have the option to do our own thing, but they always get us a really good deal. I pay $0.06595 per kWh. These Griddy people got jacked up to $9.99 per kWh! My most recent bill would have been over $7,000 at that rate.

My bill says the average temp for the billing cycle was 20 F. My bill is $94. Seeing these stories is just baffling to me.

Hey, they're free to take their business elsewhere. The market will sort itself out.  .

The truth is that Giddy will back down a fair amount. Not only will they run into some kind of price gouging law, the publicity will bankrupt them in six months when the last of their subscribers jump ship. They might as well change their name to Valuejet after this. Also, this is yet another blow to ERCOT, which had to approve the rate increase. My hunch is that ERCOT gets blown up and replaced by something new and equally dysfunctional. Heads will roll, this was too big to ignore, but they won't be the right heads I'm afraid.

[El Barto]

So just realized what Griddy is. I actually looked into it a few years back and wisely decided against it. Griddy isn't actually an energy company. It's more like Uber for electricity. In Texas, anybody that wants to can start up their own electric company, agree to purchase blocks of power from energy wholesalers, and sell it to consumers at an agreed upon rate. Green Energy Exchange has agreed to sell me electricity at $.068/kw.* That was presumably what GEX determined would be profitable. I'm guessing that they missed the mark this month, but they were likely well ahead of the game for most of the time. It's not going to bankrupt them or anything.

Griddy is actually a collective. For $10/mo you pool with everybody else to buy energy at the wholesale rate, which is in a constant state of flux. That wholesale rate changes every 5 minutes. Most of the time it'll be below what most people are paying, certainly below my .068, but sometimes it can go a lot higher. In this case that wholesale rate went from about $.03 to $9.0. I hate to put it this way, but these people kind of got what they signed on for. This isn't Griddy's fault. They signed on to fluctuating energy prices in exchange for saving a few bucks a month.

Moreover, since Griddy is entirely app based, you view your bill in realtime. A Griddy customer can go to the app and see what they're using and what they're paying at any time (which is why we were so quick to hear about this). When it went up to $9/kw they probably should have just shut the whole house down. They were armed with the knowledge that it probably wasn't the best time to be doing laundry or cooking a turkey in the oven. I know from recent experience that a 65º apartment will take some time to get down to 45º. If I find that my electricity rate has jumped to 9.33/kw, rest assured that I'm going full on Chuck McGill and terminating my service with an axe.

[ProfessorPeart]

Yeesh. Well, considering I'm not one to ever gamble when I'm in Vegas, you can rest assured that I would never sign up for a service like that. There's no difference.

[hunnus2000]

Griddy did inform their customers that they needed to switch providers before the big chill. Which is odd to me because root cause, to my understanding, was equipment failure so while they knew frigid weather was coming did they expect power grid failure?

[Stadler]

Yeesh. Well, considering I'm not one to ever gamble when I'm in Vegas, you can rest assured that I would never sign up for a service like that. There's no difference.

I won't even sign up for a variable rate mortgage; no friggin' way I'm signing up for variable energy rates.   

[El Barto]

Griddy did inform their customers that they needed to switch providers before the big chill. Which is odd to me because root cause, to my understanding, was equipment failure so while they knew frigid weather was coming did they expect power grid failure?

That's a good question. One of many. Really, this whole thing was an amazing clusterfuck, and one that honestly shouldn't have happened. This wasn't a sequence of unpredictable or unheard of events. There were no freak happenstances. This was just a bunch of people acting either negligently, criminally, or just plain greedily, and I'd love to see the appropriate heads roll. And as I said earlier, Griddy shouldn't be held up as one of the bad guys. Unfortunately, I have little faith that it'll be the appropriate heads on the block.

[El Barto]

Yeesh. Well, considering I'm not one to ever gamble when I'm in Vegas, you can rest assured that I would never sign up for a service like that. There's no difference.

I won't even sign up for a variable rate mortgage; no friggin' way I'm signing up for variable energy rates. 

Like I said, I looked into it a while back, and what scared me off was a total lack of historical information. Plenty of people saying it saved them bundles, but at no point were they providing past numbers. I thought they were making it intentionally difficult to make a valid comparison. That said, they'll be an unfortunate casualty of all of this. Maybe they can change their name to AirTran and keep operating, but I'd be surprised if they had more than 3 subscribers right now; folks currently on respirators, out of touch with what's happening outside their hospital bed. It'll take time to put together a new group of guinea pigs. 

[hunnus2000]

Griddy did inform their customers that they needed to switch providers before the big chill. Which is odd to me because root cause, to my understanding, was equipment failure so while they knew frigid weather was coming did they expect power grid failure?

That's a good question. One of many. Really, this whole thing was an amazing clusterfuck, and one that honestly shouldn't have happened. This wasn't a sequence of unpredictable or unheard of events. There were no freak happenstances. This was just a bunch of people acting either negligently, criminally, or just plain greedily, and I'd love to see the appropriate heads roll. And as I said earlier, Griddy shouldn't be held up as one of the bad guys. Unfortunately, I have little faith that it'll be the appropriate heads on the block.

My guess is that Giddy expected power grid failure. They probably had conference calls with ERCOT well before the weather event and they likely would have discussed the non-winterization of the equipment. I've lived through plenty of polar vortex's before in Texas that has extended all the way into Mexico and even Cancun and no problems with the grid.

El Barto, you're right it, it was a combination of negligence, greed and now that 20 some odd people have died - criminal.

And can someone find Rick Perry and Billy Jack his fuck-face? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVX-voqWuwY

[Cool Chris]

A utility service called Griddy sounds like something that would exist in Fraggle Rock.

[jingle.boy]

A utility service called Griddy sounds like something that would exist in Fraggle Rock.

Maybe they could recruit Gritty to be their spokes-mascot?

[ProfessorPeart]

This Texas fiasco just keeps on going. I know I saw that many board members of that oversight group or whatever resigned, now the co-ops are falling.

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/texas-electricity-firm-files-bankruptcy-064724456.html

[kirksnosehair]

Griddy did inform their customers that they needed to switch providers before the big chill. Which is odd to me because root cause, to my understanding, was equipment failure so while they knew frigid weather was coming did they expect power grid failure?

That's a good question. One of many. Really, this whole thing was an amazing clusterfuck, and one that honestly shouldn't have happened. This wasn't a sequence of unpredictable or unheard of events. There were no freak happenstances. This was just a bunch of people acting either negligently, criminally, or just plain greedily, and I'd love to see the appropriate heads roll. And as I said earlier, Griddy shouldn't be held up as one of the bad guys. Unfortunately, I have little faith that it'll be the appropriate heads on the block.

I think it's 100% driven by greed.  The negligence and criminality are just symptoms of the greed.   Next comes the scapegoating as the people who really caused this problem in the first place won't face any consequences because they're all rich and politically connected.

[TAC]

So not snow related but we had a Bomb Cyclone come through here overnight. We lost power around 5:00 this morning. Honestly, I can’t believe we made it that long. The wind has been wicked. Trees down everywhere and power out all over the place.

They said we’d get power back around noon. I don’t see it.

[lonestar]

So not snow related but we had a Bomb Cyclone come through here overnight. We lost power around 5:00 this morning. Honestly, I can’t believe we made it that long. The wind has been wicked. Trees down everywhere and power out all over the place.

They said we’d get power back around noon. I don’t see it.

That thing fucked up our area good. Certain parts of the bay had 16" of rain in a 48 hour period. Power outages, streets flooded, all the good stuff.

On the plus side, it basically ended the wildfire season, and started us back from the brink of a water catastrophe. Lake Tahoe rose 6 inches, that's over 20 billion gallons of water. Some of the major reservoirs rose as much as 30'.

[Stadler]

So not snow related but we had a Bomb Cyclone come through here overnight. We lost power around 5:00 this morning. Honestly, I can’t believe we made it that long. The wind has been wicked. Trees down everywhere and power out all over the place.

They said we’d get power back around noon. I don’t see it.

We're on the fringes of it where I am and I have sustained winds of about 30 mph.   I had a branch in my driveway this morning, though no power outage.

[lonestar]

Just heard that this weekend's rainfall was the equivalent of all of last year 

[jingle.boy]

Just heard that this weekend's rainfall was the equivalent of all of last year 

Holy fuck.

[ProfessorPeart]

I joked on Monday that we got a whole season of rain in a day. My sump pump was running every 2-3 minutes for hours. In 14 years in this house I can't say that has ever happened.

To flip to the snow thing and the posts I see I made about Texas, we have been told here in Illinois that the natural gas industry still has not recovered from the Texas fiasco and that we can expect much larger gas bills this year if we are on gas heat, which I am. They're saying expect to pay hundreds more than you did in previous years. Can't wait!

[lonestar]

Just heard that this weekend's rainfall was the equivalent of all of last year 

Holy fuck.

Not sure what's worse, 8 inches in a weekend or 8 inches in a year. (my ex can attest that the latter is weak as fuck)

[TAC]

Banged her twice that year?

[lonestar]

 

[TAC]

Just joshing!

Well, we are now 28+ hours without power.

[lonestar]

Just joshing!

Well, we are now 28+ hours without power.

If you asked my ex she'd say she went 5 years without power

[TAC]

 

I know that’s not true.




















She has fingers.

[TAC]

After 36 hours!!!!

SO POWAH SO ENERGY!!!!!!

[Orbert]

SO HEAVY SOUND!!!!!!!

[King Postwhore]

After 36 hours!!!!

SO POWAH SO ENERGY!!!!!!

How did most survive without electricity?  We are so dependent. 

[Cool Chris]

The last 7 days two terms hit my local forecast I have never heard before. First it was a 'bomb cyclone'* and now it is an 'atmospheric river.'


*which is going to be my new pornstar name

[lonestar]

The last 7 days two terms hit my local forecast I have never heard before. First it was a 'bomb cyclone'* and now it is an 'atmospheric river.'


*which is going to be my new pornstar name

I've heard atmospheric river before. Bomb cyclone is a new one to me though...and as your porn name you could call your 'finishing move' the atmospheric river.