Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick Blames Constituents for Giant Electric Bills: "Read the Fine Print"

[Nevilledog]

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Susan Vermazen 🇺🇸
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Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick Blames Constituents for Giant Electric Bills: “Read the Fine Print” - ⁦@thespybrief⁩

Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick Blames Constituents for Giant Electric Bills: “Read the Fine Print”
According to Patrick, people who were hit with $17,000 electric bills last have only themselves to blame.
apple.news
8:34 PM · Feb 24, 2021

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/02/dan-patrick-texas-electricity-bills

As millions of Texans went days without heat or electricity last week, the few that somehow didn’t lose power no doubt counted themselves extremely lucky. That is, until they looked at their energy bills and saw eye-popping, five-figure numbers nearly a hundred times bigger than what they typically owed. “My savings is gone,” Scott Willoughby, a 63-year-old Army veteran who found himself on the receiving end of a $16,752 bill, told The New York Times. “It’s been 43 degrees in the house since Monday, and I still have a $5,000 bill,” Karen Cosby told the Dallas News. “How in the world can anyone pay that,” Ty Williams wondered aloud to WFAA ABC, after noting that his electric bill was more than $17,000 for the month.

Texans hit with astronomical bills—even if they did everything they could to conserve energy—have plans whose electricity prices are not fixed and instead tied to variable wholesale prices. Obviously, that means that when demand increases, their bills rise, with the goal, according to architects of the system, being to “balance the market by encouraging consumers to reduce their usage and power suppliers to create more electricity.” But when the Texas power crisis hit, the state’s Public Utilities Commission raised the cap on electricity prices to $9 per kilowatt-hour, leaving many people with completely insane bills to pay. And all of this happened because Texas, which is the only state in the contiguous U.S. not on the national power grid, and which has been under Republican control for two decades, decided to ignore a warning from federal regulators issued 10 years ago that its power plants needed to be upgraded or they would not be able to churn out electricity in extremely cold conditions—the kind the state saw last week. In other words, people like Greg Abbott and Rick Perry and Ted Cruz are the ones to blame for constituents’ gigantic bills, though if you ask Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, Texans who’ve had to deplete their life‘s savings should spend less time writing angry letters to elected officials and more time taking a long hard look in the mirror.

In an interview with Fox News, Patrick told host Harris Faulkner, “I saw the story about the high bills. Let me explain that. We have in Texas, you can choose your energy plan and most people have a fixed rate. If they had a fixed rate per kilowatt-hour, their rates aren’t going up…. But the people who are getting those big bills are people who gambled on a very, very low rate…going forward, people need to read the fine print in those kinds of bills.”

Sure, Patrick added that the “folks” who received $2,000 and $3,000 and $17,000 bills should “not panic” and that the government is “going to figure that out,” but he also said that he’s going to get to the bottom of why Texas‘s power grid failed in such a spectacular fashion when, again, the state was warned a decade ago that it needed to winterize its power plants. So it doesn’t really seem like Patrick is great at figuring things out.

*snip*

[TheBlackAdder]

1. Your utility bills should not come with "Fine Print." Sleezebag companies use fine print to scam.

[Vinca]

2. Will this finally let it sink into people that if you vote Republican you vote against yourself?

[Stallion]

3. Hopefully Democrats target these "ignorant consumers" with the statements of Republican leadership

as Lincoln said "those are get-able votes--now get 'em"

[LeftInTX]

11. The governor has suspended all electrical bills in Texas.

There were 29,000 subscribers who did "free market", "real time" "stock market" type electricity. They were charged on their credit cards last week. But the rest of Texas does not have any electrical bills right now.

In short: No it won't change anything because the governor suspended utility bills temporarily.
Our utility, for instance is being billed for gas that it did not receive. However, no utility bills are being sent out and the CEO of the utility said it's going to be a while. Also the state wants to use FEMA money to cover electric bills.

[LastLiberal in PalmSprings]

4. The hand of the free market can slap you from either side.

Notice that the utility company will get its exorbitant bills paid, either by shaking down its customers (free market) or by way of government assistance (socialism).

Texas can take its rugged individualism and go suck rotten eggs.

They keep voting Repugs into office. Elections have consequences.

[Crunchy Frog]

5. And yet he'll still likely get reelected.

[Celerity]

10. yep

[Mersky]

6. Um, no, that's unacceptable

PUCT wiped out the pricing thresholds on the coldest morning, so previously there was no pricing basis for customers to anticipate such sky high rates.* It was ERCOT’s job to logically start sharing the grid ahead of the emergency mode that left substantial markets unable to roll power.

If everybody had to go dark for thirty minutes starting Sunday during the day, then requests to conserve might have been taken more seriously and maybe we wouldn’t have reached life or death pricing to turn up more power.

Everyday customers shouldn’t be expected to cover the costs of criminally negligent energy companies after they caused a preventable disaster.

*http://www.puc.texas.gov/agency/resources/pubs/news/2021/PUCTX-REL-COLD21-021521-EMERGorder-FIN.pdf

[alwaysinasnit]

7. The continuation of "blaming the victim" that Repugs are so good at.

[judesedit]

8. Apparently, the majority voted for those assholes, unfortunately.

[UTUSN]

9. K&R