Griddy

» see griddy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Griddy sold electricity the way a broker sells wheat. You paid $9.99 a month for the membership and then paid whatever the Texas grid happened to be charging that minute, with nothing added on top. For four years this was a good deal and not a trick, because wholesale power in Texas is cheap most of the time, and the company's own homepage put the saving at 20 percent against the state average.

The clause that made it work was the same clause that made it dangerous, and Griddy never hid it. Wholesale power in the ERCOT market is capped at $9,000 per megawatt-hour, which is $9 per kilowatt-hour, somewhere around three hundred times an ordinary residential rate. A widget on the Griddy homepage addressed this in advance: price spikes happen only 0.6 percent of the time.

Winter Storm Uri hit Texas in the middle of February 2021. Generation froze, the Public Utility Commission ordered the price pinned at the maximum, and ERCOT kept it pinned for roughly four days. Griddy billing was prepaid and automatic, so there was no invoice to argue with and no payment to withhold. On 26 February ERCOT removed Griddy from the market for nonpayment and moved its customers to other retailers, which ended the company inside a single working day.

~ the dossier ~

~ five days in February ~

Griddy had about 29,000 members. During the storm week they were charged $29 million. Individual households that kept their power on through the freeze reported bills over $5,000 for five days of service, and some ran well past that. More than 9,700 accounts had already fled by 15 February, after the company emailed its own customers telling them to switch to somebody else.

The Texas Attorney General sued on 1 March, alleging false and misleading practices. A customer in Chambers County filed a proposed class action asking for a billion dollars.

Griddy filed for Chapter 11 on 15 March in the Southern District of Texas, and the central feature of the reorganization plan it filed alongside the petition was a release for former customers who still had unpaid bills. The August 2021 settlement wiped those debts and let people who had already paid ask for the money back. The company's own framing stayed consistent to the end: the business had been destroyed by the grid operator, not by its own pricing.

~ no such product exists here ~

Nothing shaped like Griddy could ever have been sold to me. Residential electricity in Turkey is priced on a national tariff schedule set by the regulator, your distributor is decided by the street you live on, and there is no consumer-facing wholesale market you can opt into even if you want the exposure. The closest thing on offer is the three-band meter, where the rate changes at fixed hours of the day and the hours are set by regulation rather than by anybody's bidding.

As an engineer I understand the appeal of the Griddy design, because it is the honest one: put the real number in front of the customer and let them react to it. What the design assumes is that a household can react at four in the morning during a storm that has already taken out the roads.

~ the goodbye page kept selling ~

The Archive has the homepage as an ordinary sales page at 25 February 2021 21:54 UTC. At 27 February 04:17 UTC the title is "Griddy Energy" and the headline is "No choice but to power down." By 21:47 that evening the title reads "An update from the Griddy family" and the full letter is there: "It was not a choice we made. On February 16th we asked ERCOT for emergency help when our members needed it the most and they did not take action... Today, ERCOT took our members and have effectively shut down Griddy." It closes on "You will always be a Griddster."

Scroll past the letter on that same capture and the sales widgets are still running underneath it. How does Griddy add up? 20% cheaper than the Texas Average. Price spikes happen only 0.6% of the time. Nobody took them down. The host answered 404 for the whole of 2022 and today griddy.com fails at the TLS handshake, while griddy.energy returns 114 bytes of JavaScript that forwards you to a registrar's parking page.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »