This guy had his power bill on Auto-Pay, they took 17K out of his checking for last months power bill. Mf'ers ought to be hung.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/texas-resident-nearly-17000-dollar-power-bill-winter-storm

Wish I had that much in an account.

😂😂😂 - jokes on the billing company!!!!

The company said that’s around 300 times higher than the normal wholesale price, and even though 99% of homes had electricity by Thursday evening, PUCT left the pricing in place.

"The market is supposed to set the prices, not political appointees," the company said. "We intend to fight this for, and alongside, our customers for equity and accountability – to reveal why such price increases were allowed to happen as millions of Texans went without power."

How can you have the market set prices with fed., state, local governments regulating everything?

No shouldn't have auto pay.

All this electronic bullshit banking has done nothing but cause me more bullshit by my bank info getting stolen more headaches than it worth.

But it makes life so easy ,, do away with cash TODAY !!!!!!!!

Takes em a second to yank it.

Then it's all PITA schitt for the person it went down on to unfugg all that schit.
And the whole time the morons you are dealing with act like your the one at fault by inconveniencing them to do their fughing job and get their schitt straight to get your money back.

No wonder they have mass shootings sometimes or some guy goes on a rampage with a tank.
Cause some dumb clerk in billing hit a wrong fugging entry that interferred with her facebook glimpse time between " work task" and then caused a person to deal with morons trying to unfugg schit to get their money back.

$9 a KWH forced by Texas PUC?

Yep - and another lady got a bill for $16K.... That sucks...

Doesn't stuff like this happen every time there's a major extended power-outage/rolling black/brown-outs? Heat-waves, hurricanes, and ice storms?

Can’t believe Texas is allowing these power companies to financially rape Texas citizens like this.

Did you read the article?

Were we supposed to?

Drool very drool signor.

I never do.

Seriously...?

Never...

I like jumping to conclusions just as much as the next guy.

All deez dam keeds runnin my light birls up an sheeit

That's fugged up.

WTH, article says avg. household will have $5000. bill, for electricity? Jeezus...make me happy about my little tiny monthly bill of less than a hondo...

13 miles from the house here: 2470 Megawatts


Right outta the tap 😃👍

I say PUCT them.....PUCT them right in the ear.

From what I read, it sounds like they were victims of “Electricity Choice” or whatever they call it. You get to choose the generating company that you want, sometimes in exchange for a guaranteed rate for a certain period, then the hammer drops. That guy’s plan had a variable rate structure that allowed them to fugg him good under the emergency conditions. He also has three meters on his bill.

My father got hit with a $700+ bill some years ago when his heat pump quit without him noticing, He ran on the coils for a good while, which is like heating your house by burning money.

I'm on one of the FDR/Sam Rayburn electric co-ops: my current bill is $200, highest I've ever paid. Next month's bill should be a screamer because I'm running a heat pump and my heat strips were kicking on a lot the past two weeks.

All those folks that ditched their old utility and signed up with the trendy new energy middlemen are now going to swear they never noticed the fine print. And you, or someone else who didn't take that chance, are going to bail them out.

My renter will probably cry me a sob next month about the legtric bill. lol
At 6 degrees the ‘heat pump’ dont work anymore. I told her to flip that little blue light on the AUX side of the tstat. kick them 15kw heat banks in for a few days.

You cann't have it both ways. You can not advocate for free markets and fossil fuels and then get upset when you get huge bills. Then you want gov't. regulation (PUC) to keep rates low.

things are always "Bigger" in TX

Fuggin landlords.

Had a place down near Sucktomento when the wife was working down there. One "winter" month, we could hear the heat pump fan running trying to bring heat. Called the property mgmt company, they had to call the "slumlord" to get authorization for the HVAC dude to come out. He gets there and fiddles with it some, says it's making some heat, adjusts some scheidt up in there, and leaves. Bill comes, 3-4 times higher than a normal bill. We get him back out there again, after another 2 weeks of trying to get service. He goes up and fiddle farts around some more, says it's got a bad compressor or some such. He'll order the parts. In the meantime he tells us we'll be running on the heater bars or whatever the fudge he called them. I asked about them. He said it would be like running 10-15 space heaters in the house at the same time. WTF I says, we're diggin out the sweaters. Finally got it fixed and bills returned to normal. About the time the weather started to warm up.

I figured we deserved a cut in the rent, we signed a lease agreement for a house with a properly functioning HVAC system. Fuggin' slumlords, capitalist pigs they be. Makin' money off'n alla us po fokes.

Worst I've seen it community wide was in '07-'08 in Juneau when avalanches took out the transmission lines from the hydro power plant. Had to go on the diesel back up system. Electric bills quadrupled immediately. Interesting phenomenon, usage for the area dropped by over half within a month. Folks started hanging laundry in the basement near the furnace again, turning off/pulling the plug for appliances that were "on standby" all the time, going to bed earlier,etc. Big deal up there, the power company/politicians etc were all making a fuss about "why can't we always be this conscious". Folks came from Sweden or Norway or some such too, to see how it was happening. Mostly went right back to the old way when the transmission lines were fixed.

Someone brought this issue up before and now that it's on fox newz, it's magically transformed from "conspiracy theory" to reality.
🤔

One outlet during the outage said that the actual kwh cost was between 2-5 cents.
That would make the utilities the biggest monopolistic return for those investors.

I think there's corruption involved.
It's not a socialist vs. capitalist type of Steelers vs Dallas issue.
....its complicated

No one should have to pay that.... that is worse than Mafia style loan sharking...

State of Texas put in to play, they should be taking care of such bills....

That chit oughta be classified as aggravated robbery.

I can’t believe people use autopay for this exact reason! It takes all of 1 minute to log in, enter the amount owed and the payment date and then clicking submit!

Stoopid to give others direct access to your money.

The only one it benefits are the company's you let access your bank account.

True
They overcharge through the winter and call it an estimate. Then they invest their extra millions for that month and get major returns.

Beats the hell out of my last months $1900 water bill.

But mine wasn't on some silly direct payment out of my account. We negotiated.

Had it been instant??

Wake up people!. Handle your business directly. Face to face if you have to. All this electronic BS just invites atrocities like this.

Oh man!
Was there a line break?

Sounds self inflicted to me. Auto pay sounds like some kind of government sheit.

I owe almost nothing, except for the monthly things you can't get away from, but you can bet your sweet ass, you don't get access to my sheit.

But but but....auto pay is so convenient and secure!

Yep
And I was down with the covid & didn't even see the flood in the yard till I went for a blood test . Two freakin weeks later!

Never could understand giving people access to your bank account.
We do auto pay. They bill our credit card.
We get rewards for the amount billed, all our bill then get paid with
one check and stamp.

And if there is an issue, we can dispute it, they haven't taken our money.



As to the bill.
This is just like an adjustable rate mortgages.
They show you a low fee(in good times) and warn of higher rates.
People want what they want. NOW. And don't pay any attention
to the part they don't want.


Gotta laugh.
Some of these idiots knew their rates were skyrocketing. So, they
tried to change back to the normal utility deal. And the utilities
wouldn't let them.

For good reason.
After bailing for cheaper rates, they want to come back.At a time that the
utilities are paying more for energy than they are charging.


Same thing hit some here 10+ years ago.
They signed the contract and bragged how smart they were.
Then, prices went up, and they got bills up in the thousands.
Got media involved, tried to get politicians to help.

No way Jose!

The guy signed with the Utility provider whom happened to be the cheapest provider per KiloWatt at the time. The contract specified auto payment from customer's account and had a small print clause that specified under certain conditions that the rate may change depending on wholesale Megawatt rates. He agreed to terms and signed contract. The Power Generation Plant I work for has said that wholesale MegaWatts where indeed selling for $9000/Megawatt on spot market for a brief time during this cold snap. We delayed taking 650 MegaWatts off for maintenance during this time to sell load on market. Texas decided on their own that they wanted to be a deregulated power state. Regulated rates are about $.12/KiloWatt no matter the weather. Don't go down when low power demand, but they don't go up in high power demand either. It's either a free capital market or it isn't. Good or bad to both sides. Not sure if there was a way for him to know what rate he was on, but nobody forced him to leave his main breaker on. You have to read the small print, variable rates and auto pay from his account. Can't assume any company with share holders just has your best interest at heart and not theirs. I totally sympathize with the guy, but as they say, there's the other side also.

Yea, fuqk that guy, he had it coming, he for sure deserved that 17K power bill, what an [bleep].

You're an idiot.

The free market isn't always fair. 97% of the time he got lower bills but this time he lost big. I think it would be a pita to keep constantly checking prices plus you need to have a generator so you could stop using power during crazy events like last week.

Yeah, I guess reading what contract you sign isn't important anymore. He probably sends in extra money when he pays the cheap rates too. This place seems to be full of fuqkin idiots as you probably know from experience. Texas is a deregulated state. He could have chosen to buy power from a provider with a higher locked in rate, but he went for the low hanging fruit and signed a contract with a variable rate when the rate was lower than average at the time. If you feel bad for his poor decisions and not reading his contract, send him some money. The whole world is looking for a bailout for poor decisions now.

That's a dirty shame.
That happened to me too one time. The water companies fault that was working on the road next to my meter. They cracked it on my side from prying torque. Then my bill went way up and I found it and they blamed me for it. The time battling it was as costly as the bill. Those companies have no accountability.

Ken Lay still at it; never believed he really died.

Why I never use auto pay. Back in the day of land lines, I once had the phone company charge me $4,000 for phone calls. The bill showed several overseas calls that lasted for 20+ hours. I had made the calls, but they were measured in low minutes, not hours. I got threatening letters, threats of collection, ruined credit, etc. Then the phone stopped working and a tech came out. It turned out that there was a defective relay that would allow calls to be made, but failed to hang up once they were done, hence the billing for super long calls.

The phone company was very nice about it once I had proof it was their fault, but it's a LOT easier to deal with an impending bill than trying to beg them to give you your money back. Plus your money's not gone.

Pretty sure the governor told people not to pay exorbitant bills...
This is the other end of the see-saw next to the negative oil futures from last spring.