'Read the fine print': Texas lieutenant governor blames Texans for high storm energy bills

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

The lieutenant governor of Texas has blamed the state’s hard-hit residents for higher energy prices accrued throughout last week’s winter storm.

When more than four million Texans lost power as the crisis hit, the state’s Public Utilities Commission raised the cap on electricity prices to $9 (£6) per kilowatt-hour, to force users to switch off to try to protect the over-run grid.

Thousands of people’s bills were pushed up in the process, as the New York Times reported, with some resorting to their life savings to pay off the sudden debt.

Dan Patrick, the state’s lieutenant governor, told Fox News on Wednesday that the state’s residents — some of whom went days without the lights on — were personally to blame for the higher prices because they had not read the “fine print” of their contracts.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/read-fine-print-texas-lieutenant-143225178.html

[lindysalsagal]

1. Hey, Dan, psst. Commere.

Brush up your resume, darlin'.

[raging moderate]

2. In other words, victims have no rights.

Dan Patrick believes that a thug has the right to mug a victim. If the thug is successful, that only proves that the victim deserves to be mugged. The victim has no right to complain, because obviously he should have taken more effective precautions. Does that apply also to anybody who victimizes Dan Patrick?

[Klaralven]

4. Well, if you walk into the wholesale electricity auction part of town --

Where the hedge funds and energy futures speculators live, you can expect to get mugged.

People who stayed with standard rates from their distribution companies didn't get gouged.

[PJMcK]

5. Do the customers have any responsibilities for themselves?

They signed agreements in their attempts to beat the system's pricing. They lost.

Texas needs major reforms but did any power company violate any laws? That hasn't been suggested anywhere I've read.



ETA: Not all Texans signed those agreements. Many people used the fixed pricing model and didn't get hammered with mega-bills. Do they have any rights?

[Ms. Toad]

7. No. In other words, if it sounds too good to be true -

it probably is.

People who took advantage of pennies on the dollar wholesale electricity prices should not come running to the rest of us to bail them out when the wholesale price is no longer so cheap.

This is not a mugging. This is a legally binding contract. You agreed to it - you're stuck with it. It's called allocation of risk. Those on fixed-rate contracts have been paying more all along in exchange for their provider accepting the risk of price fluctuation. Those paying wholesale chose to accept the risk, in exchange for (often) unbelievably cheap rates.

It isn't even fine print - it was an essential part of the basis of the bargain.

Should the government have prohibited consumers from taking the risk? Perhaps. But they didn't. So the rest of us shouldn't be forced to bail out the stupidity of the government of the state of Texas. If Texas wants to bail out its citizens - fine.

[PJMcK]

3. Something bugs me about this story

Oddly, I think that Patrick has a legitimate point. The people getting hit with the mega-bills signed agreements that they obviously didn't think through or understand. That's a shame but so what? Because these customers gambled on their energy prices and lost, are the power companies supposed to forgive the bills? Or is the state government supposed to bail out the customers?

I am not absolving the power companies of their fundamental malfeasance. It's just that if you agree to a deal and it turns out badly for you, who is really responsible for the predicament?

In essence, if the deal seems to good to be true, it probably is not going to work out well for you. Put another way, caveat emptor.

The fundamental blame for Texans' power problems lies with the dominant Republican Party in the state. They were the ones who set up their house of cards and now those miscreants want to blame renewable energy for the problems?! How ludicrous. They were warned a decade ago that they had to upgrade and weatherize their power systems. They didn't do that and one suspects that instead of investing in their infrastructure, they doled out their profits as bonuses to their executives.

Clearly, Texas needs major reforms to their public utilities. I don't put too much faith in the state's Republicans to fix this glaring problem, though.

Nonetheless, one is supposed to know what a document says before one signs on the dotted line.

[EarlG]

6. Hmm, and who was responsible for convincing Texans that a regulated system would be SOCIALISM

thereby leaving homeowners who were dumb enough to, let's see here -- FAIL TO HIRE A LAWYER BEFORE SIGNING UP WITH A POWER COMPANY -- to be preyed upon by those companies, who offered low, low prices, then turned around and whacked customers with a $20,000 bill for two day's worth of electricity?

You guessed it!

Antifa.



Edited to add: it's true that many customers probably knew exactly what they were getting into when they signed up -- they were enticed by low prices, they knew the risks, and they ignored the risks hoping to save themselves money. In other words, they gambled and lost. But seriously, who would create a utility system like that?

[questionseverything]

8. So the same companies that refused to winterize their system

Now gets to collect huge prices for the tiny bit of product they have available during the crisis


Im hindsight it’s obvious these customers with the variable rate made a big mistake but who among us would suspect a ten thousand percent increase, and who would think the company setting themselves up for that increase was legal/ moral?