So what's the deal with all the chatter on social media and local news outlets concerning Giddy Power customers getting outrageous electric bills? I seem to remember reading the price their customers pay is based on market rates, rather than a set contract rate.

Market rates have been quite high the last couple of weeks.

Demand has been crazy this past week with it reaching up to $8.00 per kWh during the afternoons.

Yes, that seems to be a culprit. The excessive heat put high demands on the grid which in turn pushed the wholesale price skyward as well. Some have reported bills in excess of $200 or more for a single day of power. Makes sense when you're paying $8 per kWh and your neighbors are paying at contract rate of less than 10 cents. Lesson being learned no doubt.

It's going to be interesting to see what happens next with customers having to pay through the nose for electricity.

$200 per day???!!!
I bet Bill doesn’t pay that in a year !

As pointed out, Giddy customers are having to pay the market rate, which was pointed out earlier as having reached $8 per kWh. Contract fixed rates remain in the 8-12 cent per kWh range.

Energy Ogre has cut my summer electricity bills in half. Couldn’t be easier and worth the $10 per month.

And I thought Denton Municipal was high!

I'm locked in @ 9.9 cents per KWH through September. Dread shopping for the new rates.

As far as I know I have a contract at about 9.8 or so--for five years. The contract is about a year old. But here is an article from this morning.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019...riday-energy-costs-triple-amid-heat-wave

No choice for me - on a co-op. Reasonable though

Somebody ‘splain to me why the price of electricity goes up during high demand...
The cost of generating said electricity per KW is stable at any load.

Because they can get it. Supply and demand.

This is not bad.

One of the byproducts of what I do is make and sell electricity. Earlier this week it reached $900/mw or $9/kw for a few hours. This is a mandated maximum price. I don’t know who mandates it. For reference anything over $15/mw is profitable enough to export in the type of system we have.

Same here, not bad though at $.08

My city of Denton is 10.4, but we are about to be in a **** storm because the city spent a bunch of money on a gas electric generation system that is being underutilized.

We also have a coal powered plant that we are having to buy out of since the city wants to be green.

I gotta move.

The cap is actually $9,000/mw hour and we pinned it for quite a few hours on Tuesday and Thursday. As to the comment above that, the cost of generating electricity is absolutely not the same at any load, theres a very well defined load stack within each company as well as ERCOT on whole. The generators in this state have struggled financially enough over the past few years that these occasional price spikes are an absolute necessity to keep them viable. Look at their stock performances and you'll see this is really not a controversial statement.

Now if we want to open a can of worms, we can debate whether this wouldve happend had the enviros not shut down all the coal and lignite that they have across the state.

I see, I must have misread or was just thinking bad on my email about the cap. Either way I knew we hit it. When it gets Hugh enough we consider shutting down and selling everything we can make. We have a small generator at 4mw and consume about 3.2mw. Sometimes ERCOT will make the decision for us.

Same here